Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“Were you hunched down here listening to me or waiting for me to have a heart attack when I saw these dead bodies?”

“Please, lady. We meant good.”

“They did. They told me,” said Sponce. He was seeking the level of maturity, at least to that of Egan of the cross and gray ponytail. At least a trustable ass.

“We sharing these folks, but they ain’t ours. The sheriff can call up north and get us a reward,” said small Jacob.

“That’s not a good idea, little boy,” said Egan. He had been sweating mightily even before this conversation.

The boys now hunkered. She could barely perceive they were waddling toward her. Raymond shared lust for vision with the eldest, Ulrich. She saw they were fascinated by her black curls. Her Cuban Florida face. They wore her shirts, but she didn’t notice. Blanched coffee beans with faces on them, these boys. No Indian or black. Small earnest Ulstermen looking for a mother and her music.

She began singing, incredibly, facing away from them all but facing Max Raymond and his weapon, lowered. The song was about a baby, the mountain and the sea. She sang it quietly, but there were high notes that made the boys quiver. At the end Jacob reached over to touch her wrist. She held his hand. The three of them walked toward her kitchen. Isaac and Sponce knew they weren’t meant to follow.

She had become used to the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.

She had once sung a song taken from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.

Summer grasses,

Where soldiers dreamed.

Now she sang that one to her new swamp acolytes, rapt twice over for being nearly in her face. She sat on the back steps after feeding them ham and Gouda on French bread with mayonnaise and a tall bottle of orange soda pop. Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash. Sister singing away the last days of her youth.

Raymond had gone back inside and was sleeping. The preacher Egan had hung around for a reason unclear to her. He went back and forth to and through the border of tree arches, unseen at the foot of the swamp.

Raymond suddenly knew it was time to return to the bad restaurant and then his ache for visions would be satisfied. The bad restaurant would stay when only zombies prevailed. It served food for the dead, tired fishermen and humble vacationers worsened the instant they sat down and had the bad water. Thousands like it at state lines, watering holes in the great western deserts, far-flung Idaho and Maine. Their owners say, “We just couldn’t help it, we were food people. We never said good food people.”

Raymond was in the pawnshop looking at a delightful saxophone and about to buy it when the feeling hit him. What he would see and be transformed by was right next door to his own cottage, not out in the fars, the wides, the bars or churches. He put the saxophone down and within seconds saw a shadow pass the shop. It was a man hobbling and slurring the few words he could manage, and Raymond was positive it was Mimi’s old ex, what was left of him after the suicide attempt in Vicksburg, rolling and pitching up Market and the pawns to find Raymond. He went out to the walk and saw nothing but a red car leaving, and he followed it in his own. Mimi was in Miami singing with another band for a couple of weeks. He was alone. He knew this was right. He had not eaten for two days, for no good reason. The moment was pressing.

A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of this saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces ahead into otherness . Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.

Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession , thought Raymond, following the red car. Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another . He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstands imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.

The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. Refill that beige for you, sir? Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war.

Because as Mimi Suarez’s grandfather said, When you eat well, you are eating memory . But here for a few cents less, you could eat no life at all. You could eat as much history as just ended in the kitchen, cooked in spite at great speed by an inmate of dead dreams. A sort of hospital food with more dread in it.

Oh yes, mambo, salsa, shake that tree, bitch, let them coconuts of yours fall down . Max Raymond heard the man in the crowd watching Mimi in Miami right then. Each heavy command resounded in his head. He’d never experienced anything like this before.

The red car was indeed heading for the lake, through Redwood, the low fields and waters. Grim bluster of new black clouds in the west. This was storm country. Vicksburg, 1959, a tornado came through, tore out half the town, created new lakes, killed scores. He watched breaths circle a lawn, lifting the leaves of a collapsed muscadine arbor. The smell somewhere as if lightning had opened a melon, electrified sperm. He thought of the hot grease pitched on the honeysuckle by a zombie of the restaurant’s kitchen. In a meadow he caught a wave of dead-fish smell. Oh, the Onward cemetery. Called There Now . Har.

He was closer to rot and birth with every mile. This place was lodges, bulks of mobile homes, old trailer villages where fugitive creatures abided. Modern doctors did not vacation here anymore, nor modern anybody much, although the fishing was good. The town would ghost out in a bad fishing season, a hot spell, and the loneliness left behind could hurt you physically in the eyes. Long tubal aches to the grand home of migraine and hot rain at noon. The doctors took their families skiing in the West or to the Islands, where they mimicked life as best they could with the new big money. The wives haggard from hanging on to beauty.

Max Raymond realized all of a sudden he had very little doctor money left. It was nearly all saxophone money now. Or Coyote money. Not too bad. He would buy the house and make the landlord happy that its haunted memories would stay in good hands. His life, this place where something was. The red car? A boomerang on the curves now, all red.

Fifteen miles behind him, Vicksburg, city of the bluffs. Gilbraltar of the West at one time. Now into these casinos dime-store Legbas bid the weak and bored come in. See the man with the wonderful saxophone! Illuminations of the bridge over Louisiana at night. Capitulant city! Shops crying deeds and titles for cash. Children out at the orphans’ camp because their parents were for sale without buyers. Drugs, car wrecks.

Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night. In their big sprawling cottage, what good storms Mimi and he watched together. Popping those souls that cannot die but must return to open-microphone poetry slams against an adjacent junior college. Catering by the bad restaurant. Pop, a soul in bliss for just seconds thinks it has actually died and is moving away somewhere beyond this green echo chamber. No such luck, only the cynical lightning.