Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“The best thing about dogs and kids,” Ulrich cried out near the end, feverishly intoxicated, “is they ain’t going anywhere. They’re already there !”

He dandled Emma the cherub on his knee, breathing tortuously, from the emphysema, in long tugs and seekings of his lungs. This angel was not frightened of Ulrich. She thought he was a train. Then one of the fifteen-year-olds took the baby girl in her own arms, saying, “Oh, this one’s coming home with me!” At one time Melanie pressed her nose against her own windowpane, watching down the hill in miserable incredulity.

And , thought Raymond, pulling into the parking lot of the bad restaurant, back almost to my front door . He didn’t shake as much as he expected he would, and he put the pistol in his belt against his stomach, put the coat on as he stood from his car. The red car, a Mercury Sable, was here all right. The tag wasn’t Memphis. It was local. He knew now. But he wasn’t certain why it should go on. One would make a quick move. The other would pay. A hum of grief came to his ears.

The air was solid with earth- and tree-frog song. They went kecka kecka kecka in the early night, the storm blown past.

The man was at a table next to the wall, tall even in his chair. His eyes were in shadow. Nobody else was about. His hair seemed too great for his neck, which had gotten thinner. Raised and swept to width, set like soft wire. He could be a singer, an evangelist, a small-town sinner living out a sneer established at seventeen. An almost effeminate elegance too, a man deep in self-study, a creature of mirrors.

Raymond looked into the backs of the man’s hands on the table. A meal hardly touched in front of him.

“I know you. What is it, Man?” asked Raymond.

“I came out here to get a second opinion. You the doctor?”

The doctor of yester-Memphis stood in the aisle. “Sit down,” Mortimer said. “Unless you planning your way out already.”

As Raymond sat, the trance that had brought him here was broken. The man at this level looked frail, whining, “You called me names and wouldn’t let me in your club. There might be a new vote, though. It’s a democracy everywhere you look. Sidney wants me to come aboard.”

Raymond had not expected wit, if this was wit. Could evil be witty? If this thing was evil. The hair almost its own life. The Everly Brothers. God recalls them. Two boys packed into one hairdo.

Somebody was in the back. They were the only ones still in the dining area. The hour was desolate, dim, redolent of fried meals. Scorched crust of meat in the nostrils.

“Raymond, let me tell you something that might get your attention. I had to see you. Where is that big knife or whatever? Show it to me.” Raymond reached inside to show Mortimer the butt under his coat. This did not feel unnatural. If he missed him here, he had the longer gun back at the house with the hollowpoints, and he was very good with that one at age eleven.

“You want some of me?” Mortimer raised his hands. He had thinned a good deal, almost to gauntness. He seemed ill.

“I came to destroy you. I don’t know much, but I know you’re bad straight through.”

“No, not at all. You going to help me find some friends. . acquaintances that went wrong, let’s say.”

“How would you get help from me? Can’t you see I’ve got a pistol?”

“I must have been blind.” Mortimer had a face under his face, grinning like a blanched skull. “You ain’t got the goods, sonny. After the oath you took. ‘First do no harm.’ I’ve had many a doctor acquaintance. Put them to work too.”

“Shut up.”

“Like the orphans’-camp job. There’s an opening.”

Raymond hated the word stare, but it was a verb that occupied half of art and life and that was what he was doing, as in a French movie. As if his eyes were, beyond God and law, the single powerful arbiter in the room. “I’m going home,” said Raymond. He was shaking.

Mortimer laughed. “Not that .”

Raymond turned, relieved totally and sopping wet under his arms. He was beginning the walk. A noise broke out behind him, but he wouldn’t look at it. Then a huge pain entered the flesh near his spine. He could not account for it, then did not believe it. He tripped and stumbled, flailing at chairs, never falling. Only at the last, before he knocked his head on a chair back, did he crane his head.

Mortimer sat at the table with a silver penknife in his hand. It was a thin short blade but not short enough. Blood was on its hasp. Raymond held his wound and staggered out the door, then into the gravel, where he thought, There is a gun in my car . But he was wearing the gun, or rather now it had slipped, the long martial thing, into the crotch of his underwear with the barrel down his right leg, sinking lower even then and trying for his ankle. He was stiff-legged. The monster of pusillanimity. His house was a hundred years away. The Mossberg was in there. His interest in the avocation of gunning was on the wane, however. He felt Mortimer right behind him. He had fled nothing. The man was swift and quiet to boot.

“Let’s go right to the bone people in your backyard. I got the lantern, good buddy. You want to take a leak or anything?”

Raymond struggled with the descending.38, which was making for his knee that moment.

“Oh, go ahead and take your time. Go on in the house there and take a long leak. I don’t want you uncomfortable, Max. Sure, let’s both go on in. I’m wantin’ to look at that foxy lady again. Been missing her.” Mortimer walked ahead of Raymond, up the steps crowded by thick Carolina jasmine vine and honeysuckle, dead bees underfoot that got drunk and fell. He opened the door for Raymond. Raymond felt this was as lowly as his existence could get, but he had to sit on the couch.

“Can I look around? Boy, now that was selfish. It was me who had to take the good long leak. You can’t beat a good piss for clearing the mind and putting a plan to things. Boy, I might not leave. Uh-oh! Your bedroom, Max, somebody left their gun right on his pillow . Great Lordy son, this is one horny ol’ lonesome dude. I got girls too, Dr. Raymond. Your missus, as I recall, would be in Miami getting leched on by all the old folks from Cuba? The Cubans, now, they’re hung I hear, and greased, with a golden earring, bandanny. But she got you. That’s a good one. She ought to be wearing you for a Tampax. Little music boy don’t wanna be no doctor no more.”

Raymond was pondering the depth of his puncture and wondering how long it had been since anybody called him Max, as Mortimer did. High risibility. The wound’s nothing. He’s going to hurt me. He had hands on both kidneys and arose as a token of manhood.

“Come on now, Maxy. Follow the old lantern and let’s just see some bone, my man. I had an interview with Pastor Egan, the ponytailed cross-cheeked boy, and he told me just about where. Said you wouldn’t mind my dropping by and smashing up a few with me.”

“I don’t mind. They’re almost kids’ toys now, anyway. Wired-up.”

“You want to bring your gun for snakes?”

“I really don’t.”

“I’m afraid of those things. Well, snakes and guns. You remember how it was with me and snakes?”

“Yes.”

“That old — Christ, they’re all old, it’s hard to remember which one — said, ‘We don’t hear sounds like that from a man around here.’”

Raymond slapped at the fronds and walked him directly to the site of the people. When the lantern beam found them, Mortimer jumped past him like a dash man bobbling the light. He hurried straight to the woman and kicked her head off but it tangled in her rib cage and swung on the coat-hanger wire. But he followed with a field-goal boot to the plexus that sent the remainder of her affairs clattering.