Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“That was us, son,” said Ulrich. “We needed some things. And we needed protection. I agreed with your uncle.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I knew who that was. This person left something square in the middle of the front room. They didn’t take anything.”

“Left something?”

“A football.”

“Why?”

“It was sitting on top of the Edwards newspaper about some game a few weeks back where somebody in the men’s room got his face nigh cut off.”

“I saw the old bodies, the old bones myself,” said Carl Bob.

“You’ve got to stop that. Somebody’ll hear and haul you off. You couldn’t have seen the bodies. They were in a car underwater till a sinkhole took the water out.”

“I don’t mean underwater. I mean behind the doctor’s house. I looked out the window at night and there were two skeletons and some little boys sitting beside them like in church.”

“That’s right. He told me,” added Ulrich. “Three nights ago when the girl was singing on the back porch. Some animals come up too. Two deers, a bear, a ghost of a orangutan.”

“No orangutans,” said Carl Bob.

It suddenly occurred to Egan that his uncle looked like Basil Rathbone and Ulrich looked like an elderly Mortimer Snerd. Then the name Mortimer passed through him.

Roman was riding his motorbike with Melanie Wooten clasped behind him. These were grave times, but they were not sure how grave. Roman’s wife waited for more tests. Basal cell lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which wasn’t too bad. But she had begun bleeding, masses had shown. She was up and about but weak, and they had her in the chemo now. Roman did not know what to do with disease. Except for his wounds, his wife and he had been healthy and they were not old and they had done nothing much dissipating or poisonous. He smoked a little. She could eat a great deal without gaining, and she liked two stiff drinks of Maker’s Mark now and again. Melanie had helped as she could, but Bernice Roman did not take to help, although she was pleasant enough. The woman acted distinctly outraged by her luck, as if still misdiagnosed.

This was not as much fun as Melanie expected, but it was trouble of a sort that she still wanted. She had never had a black friend, and she thought it ridiculous that she could die without having this man as one. He liked her and reminded Melanie of early playmates in Texas. But she wondered if there were any left around the lake who might shoot them. She was so tired of race. She was warier since the destruction of the glass animals. The world with that person out in it, wild and needy and ugly.

A man stood in the road, just a man alone. He was staring at her and Roman, but a flat field suddenly interested him and she couldn’t see a car. They came to a little bridge over a creek after passing the man, and the motorbike wobbled on twelve-by-twelves. You didn’t want to catch a tire between them. But then they shook as a car came up behind them. She turned and watched as a Lexus SUV neared them. The windows were smoked. Roman drove to the right to let it pass, but the Lexus stopped when they were abreast the front passenger door. Roman drove around it across the road to his left to force a decision, but it passed them. Roman stopped. Holding the motorbike between his spread sandaled feet. Melanie tapped him on the shoulder to show the Lexus had stopped with them.

Nobody opened the door. The sun glare off it was hot. You could see the car as the house of whatever your mind held. The people inside were not visible, so you guessed many and not one. The elevation and headroom were preposterous even for a large rich fool. Still it sat blind, dumb, glaring. The whole world was the gravel and this vehicle. Roman got off the bike and kickstanded it. The two of them walked up to the window, a bright maw next to opening but not. There was some activity behind the smoke. It was a human tongue circling the glass, licking and sucking it. They could see nothing except the mouth working dimly. But the glass went down inches, and Man Mortimer looked over the top of the window at them. Devoid of expression, yanked-in tongue, flat, overall. The rearview reflected the ones in the back who did not know they were revealed. It was old Sidney without his shirt, very mottled and speckled, silvered concave chest. Marcine and Bertha, the car-lot girl, were working on him.

Then the glass rose and stopped the view. The Lexus went off at urgent speed.

“That’s a lot of car,” said John Roman, “to be fucking with you. I’m sorry I said that, but—”

They knew well who the backseat lovebird was, but it took minutes to get their three or four images of Mortimer together. These still did not make one man, because they had little but a forehead and a mouth. Old Sidney perched right in the love nest, at ease in the rearview mirror. He could enjoy his money and new friendship, a major change from his old man. The shamelessness of it shook Melanie, the ugliness. But she who with Facetto. . it was not good to pursue this concept. The SUV all black and swollen, it hurried as if recently parted from a gathering of its fellows in a wealthier country.

It was getting hard to have innocent fun. All seemed driven toward a calculated nightmare. The football game, Pepper, poor Bernice with her cancer, the tongue in a fretting black ghoul of a car.

They never rode the motorbike together again. She missed the touch of Roman’s fat shoulders. She had never felt the war wounds beneath his shirt, as she suspected she might.

The pleasant day erased by that thing on the window of the Lexus.

It occurred to her how many motions people made to simply present themselves to a window, a mirror, a sea of nobodies. These groomings, pulling straight the pants, licking a finger for the hair out of place. She had heard these all were movements of those before execution. Why else so circumspect? Your first impression on the gallows.

John Roman thought. He fished with a spinning rod. He had delayed the pleasure of artificial bait — casting deliberately until he retired. Times were wretched in many ways. Bernice and cancer, tongue on window, old men on the run from relatives for loving animals too much and learning to talk with the beasts, a grown white man shrieking with a sound that should not be heard when he stumbled close to snakes in the willows. But you could get as good a spinning reel and rod as the pros for cheap at Big Mart, against which there was no competition. The local fishing-supply stores didn’t even attempt it but went rather for a fishing class that imagined itself temporarily detained by Mississippi until it could get to the glossy lakes and streams in magazine photographs at the doctor’s office.

Roman fished long and guiltily because Bernice did not want him home fretting about her condition. She’d lost some weight and looked even more Indian now. Perhaps the last trace of the Natchez tribe. He was another sort of Indian partly, Chickasaw, lost in the South.

Melanie was on his mind, how she was doing. He hadn’t fished close to her house for a while. She was a friend in a panic to live, and he didn’t want to be her instructor. Life itself was not much of an instructor but more like the fits of a runaway child. It would shock you with depravity and staggering kindness within the same hour. If you could get used to that, you might learn, but life itself didn’t especially want to follow up on anything.

It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.