Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“I got no reason to live.”

“No,” both rushed in. “Yes.”

“I’m just a nowhere cunt. I don’t even have a hobby.”

Nobody said anything. Mimi envisioned a helpless vagina hanging over the chair back. Melanie felt something on her spine, wet. Then this succubus went into the slope of the yard. They studied the swimming boys raptly as if they had never seen children or water.

“Well, dear,” Melanie said at last. “They also serve who stand and wait.”

“Crossword puzzles helped me through a bad patch a few years ago,” added Mimi.

“Oh God.” Dee laughed.

Melanie giggled. “Church is good for some.”

The boys turned from their violent wading to hear hoots and shrieks of laughter from the porch. The women seemed to tremble and reach for air around the wicker chairs. The boys’ infant sister stood between the women with a glass uplifted in her hands, into the gin.

The pleasure barge closed in on the pier from the western horizon. The engines puttered grandly, washing out the black water. But the men wore the look of mild disappointment common to travelers everywhere, having failed to find a miracle or endure a metamorphosis. Only a further gravity on the face. They could have returned from an expedition around the rim of a vast navel. Harvard, Max Raymond. Ulrich and the ex-priest, found near the animal shelter trying to speak words of love to the inmates through a door. Wren, Lewis and Sidney Farté, more confident since the hacking of his dad, a celebrity and a capitalist. Nobody spoke. Still, they were alert to something new at the pier.

It was Mortimer, down from the hill off a brand-new Norton, in a leather sports coat and fine boots in the style of the Mounties. They knew he was strange before they saw his face closely. Sidney hollered out, “You the man!”

The others looked over at Sidney doubtfully. Mortimer was still a little bent from the stab through the gonads, but he had the posture of a range warrior familiar to cow dung and burning oil. He held a child-size football in his hands, flirting with its shape, unused to it. He did watch the barge arrive and walked into the edge of the water. The boys ran almost on top of him, thrashing. Then they saw. They froze to the bottom of the lake. He had crept up on everybody in the shadowless remnant of the afternoon.

“Say, boys. I don’t know how hard you can take an old pass. What say let’s run for a few goals.” He fired the little ball at dangerous speed past the head of Isaac, and the ball skipped toward the willows behind. Mortimer went in up to his knees with his pants billowing. He waded for the ball.

“We got to make some memories here, boys. You got some bones for me? You best get me in a good mood.”

“I’ll blow your ass off for you,” said Jacob.

“Is he asking them for help or after them?” asked Melanie, at last seeing the man new to the evening.

Dee had never imagined Mortimer in this form. She could not comprehend this person had ever touched her, but she felt a sour loyalty that confused her. She was fascinated and drunk. A pipe organ went off through her head. Jangling lines of nerves like she was coming or vomiting.

Three fat moccasins hung in the willow forks behind Mortimer, and he was unaware. The boys saw. Isaac made a motion of a receiver through the water away from the willows. “I’ll play. Throw here. I’ll get her.” Mortimer fired the ball too high, but Isacc leaped and almost grabbed it. Then he waded out and retrieved it. “Go long, Mr. Mortimer!”

The man was half out of the water pantomiming a varsity end, for as he recalled from Missouri, you ran long and then barely missed, every time. A sort of coolness toward completion. He was too suave to really try. He jumped a bit in inches of water, but the ball sailed over him into the snake roost. Mortimer plunged on by momentum right among the fat sleepers, one of them seven feet.

The boredom of the men on the barge was interrupted by a man screaming and flinging in the water. Wails pitched like a woman’s. You did not hear this much in men. Mortimer shook his hands and you thought he might die of your shame for him. Then he began scrambling out of the water and up, up the grass. His leather coat was flecked by shore mud. The bargemen looked downward.

Sidney was in despair. The others could not know why he had invested trust in this man. Mortimer straightened and walked slowly to the pier and to the bow where Harvard and Raymond tied up. Raymond was drunk.

“Hello, sir,” said Harvard.

“I was admiring your ship the other day, and I came over to see if I could join the club. You boys seemed to’ve got things all smooth as a baby’s ass.”

“Is that your red motorcycle up that hill?” asked Raymond.

“It is. It’s part of me now. I live it.”

“You can’t come aboard, not now we’ve heard you over there like that. What was that?”

“It was snakes. I was in snakes. You’re the saxophone man. You making the rules about the boat club?”

“No, there weren’t any rules until you went over the line. You think anybody’d want that sort of noise aboard? You’ve created the one rule.”

It was Harvard’s barge, but he was not interrupting this drunk. He was nodding his head.

“This ain’t right. He don’t have to prove—” began Sidney.

“You’re barely with us yourself, Sidney. You didn’t believe in it. Why don’t you be quiet?” scolded tall Lewis, surprisingly solid for one so translucent and veined.

Sidney was furious but quiet for a while. He was very confused because he had watched this very man hack off his father’s head through the glass of the stockroom door. It seemed to him old Pepper finally looked at the wrong man with contempt for supporting him.

Man Mortimer had known instantly the nature of Pepper’s heart and destroyed him straightaway, Sidney imagined, while others had known and borne cowards like himself. Sidney had never tried to hide his glee. He told his peers that old Pepper’s death was the sweetest gift the man had ever given him.

“And the store, of course,” Harvard added.

Now the same man who had killed Pepper almost in an accident of random frenzy told Raymond, “I don’t need your club. You’re drunk and I’m letting this go. Lots have nerve that’s full of liquor.”

“I’m as drunk as I ever get, and then I’m never wrong. I smell evil and it walks like you,” said Raymond.

“Weren’t you a doctor?”

“I was. At your service.”

“You don’t get many to just quit. You musta mouthed yourself right out.”

Mortimer turned and walked up the hill slowly. He did not look Dee’s way or toward the porch at all, except to mutter near it, and the women heard. “Old Sidney he said he saw through her window the other night. Little granny giving a blow job to the law.”

None spoke.

Dee had passed a line where the gin no longer obtained, but she pretended to sip. She saw herself trembling beneath a ghoul in a red chamber of sin. A creature whose veins were swollen blue. They swayed in a penthouse lit with gilt over the raving casino. Grim fun against laws of God and man. Beasts crawled away ashamed. I queen bring wreckage to my lover . For seconds she could not remember her relation to the present evening and its people. Everything was yonder except a central burning ruin, the howl of her counterpart. Then she recalled the man in the mud-smeared leather coat.

“That man, I’ve seen him in some other version,” said Melanie.

“He was pitiful, nasty,” said Mimi.

“He seems to be wanting to join things,” Melanie said. “I know who it was. The man on the orphans’ barge. He brought those teenage girls back to the camp. They’d run away. And Dee, he sat at our table uninvited at the casino music hall.”