Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Then he jumped on the skull over and over, grinding it with his Mountie boots, waving the light and demanding Max Raymond join in, take the child.

ISAAC AND JACOB WERE ODDLY WELL BEHAVED, DOMESTIC. They straightened the house and talked around the old Ford that Hare had pulled from the swamp. It was behind their garage, a sagging building with stacks of National Geographic s in it from a previous tenant. The boys would ask if the house was really theirs, and Dee told them she was pretty sure it was. Her gone husband was bad at details, but he was a good provider, sometimes a flush one. She and the boys could satisfy myriad needs in Big Mart. They straightened the house again.

They hunkered in prospect of manhood, waiting on Hare to build the beam and trestle faster. The sun-grayed back of the garage was Hare’s drama curtain, they said. He had to tell stories in front of it while he worked and they sat. They pressed him for tales of other machines and major explosions.

Harold Laird stared off as if in conspiracy with other mechanics near the horizon. It was a labored stare of either profound stupidity or alienation. He had looked constantly in himself for a likeness to his progenitors but failed. His large teeth, big legs and no chest or much rear. Too late, but he had entered the black church up the road and stolen a book from its meek open library called How to Be a Teenager . He gave it to the little ones later, but they discarded it because it was about how to be a nice teenager, which Harold Laird had been. But he had gotten it for himself to see what he had been, and he was going back for How to Be a Man and wouldn’t share it. Laird had hung in the background of his own history. He could not read well and hoped that in the next book there would be pictures of Christian women naked, since he was going to be a husband.

Actually he had once, with others, participated in an event with a woman from Edwards in the bed of a truck, but he was still unsure whether he was manned or not. He was betrothed before to the silhouette of a woman on a bottle of some good-smelling Oil of Olay he found, but could break it off. She had owned him for years now. He could not leave himself alone sometimes, a sin.

The boys’ voices were quiet. They were hesitant to laugh or dream or curse. The heat kept up its unsurprising late misery. The mind was brown at the edges, the tongue dry and slow. Dee slept in the weak air-conditioning of October. Little Emma beside her was so good that her mother expected her to die any day, as angels were snatched away early to paradise. Once, when Dee had a migraine, the child she now held in sleep massaged her temples the entire night. When Dee opened her eyes at dawn, the child had fallen asleep with her doll’s hand on Dee’s forehead. Dee wondered if they were born twice as sensitive as normal women.

Emma was gone when Dee woke, knowing it was too late to get out of a story she had dreamed. She had few powers. But she was trying. The better part of her was that she liked to heal old people once she knew their pain. She was not a cynical nurse, not at all. She just did not like letting on to her sincerity in front of fools. She could change languages to soothe folks of wild diversity and wants, though her most natural posture was that of the slut paring her nails. In her dream she was chained in a basement with many sex parts that howled on their own.

Then she had dreamed she was running up a hill with women, hundreds of them, arms out to what beckoned at the crest. A row of cannons blew down on them, blasted them apart, but they were happy and they sang, like Japanese infantry, exploding into mists of ecstatic nerves. Then they arose and became everything, even the cannons. The hill, the tree, the barn, everything. She woke feeling she could commit suicide this minute with huge happiness because she would leave the world a finished job.

She was not sure the meaning of her dream. Without the help of gin, she felt no common sisterhood to women. She also knew she could not leave Emma until the girl was strong and ready. Like the younger boys but not Sponce, who shouldn’t even still be home. Thing was, Sponce was in love with her, her own son. He feared the uglier world.

Hare was at her door. He was not a bad-looking boy, and he seemed to have acquired more and more manners, even unnecessary ones. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.

“They took the baby for a treat,” he said.

“They never do that.”

“We’re alone. They cleared the way for me. Us.”

“Of which there isn’t any.”

“I have changed since I first saw you. You are beautiful. So beautiful. My thoughts were animal-like. But now I’m like family. We’re all in it together.”

“In what?”

“A home.”

“Who are Mommy and Daddy?”

“They could be us.”

“Do I look pitiful?”

“Not at all.”

“Just checking. I’m kind of married.”

“I’m proposing me as husband. One, I am steady. Two, I am good with my hands. Three, Mortimer is out of the picture.”

His hands were nice and he could fix things. She studied him across a moat of indifference and time. His throbbing youth softened her. He looked filled now, thicker. Like some boys she knew who had come back from the army.

“It just seems like you need a home, Harold. I’m already here. My roof.”

“I never saw a girl I needed before I met you.”

“Is it the nurse’s outfit?”

“It’s everything that gets to me.”

“One day soon I’ll look in the mirror and see everything you like about me is over. I’ll know the day. You’d be stuck with an old bag of flakes. I’ll turn into an outhouse overnight. With heavy lipstick.”

“No.”

“Then you’ll know how bad I am. It’ll be on my face, every damn story writ in wrinkles.”

“How can you say those things?”

“Go up to the casino and see. It’s where us old party girls go to die and have a club. Some turned, some just about. Sulky old things with the girl cut out of them. It’s not the same with men.”

“I’ll stick.”

“Such hope.”

“You’re my reason to live.”

“Do you get it? I’m what men remember. I’m not what they need. It’s been said to me. What I am is foreign pussy.”

“You didn’t mean to be.”

“How do you know?”

He dropped his head. The long gentle fingers of his right hand covering his face.

“Stop playing house,” she said. “Build what you want on your own.”

“But you’re clean. You don’t smoke or drink, much.”

“They aren’t my drugs. Please go on now. I don’t care to break your heart.”

Laird went out onto the front porch, shivering in the warmth, lost between homes. Engorged by despair and desire. He had heard her words as the wail of a kidnapped queen. Unransomed these two decades of his spindly life. He thought of the marines, or the long honest life of an expert mechanic.

Both of them seemed chores in hell now.

Life was just this, you got a lot of money and you bought things. No other game. You bought her, a house, a family. You didn’t pull fifty-three-year-old things out of a swamp and fix them. He was angry and small. A gnat. He turned and went inside.

She was staring at the blank television.

He had no story to put on its screen for her. But he would have her and then tell it. It would begin with an old Ford coupe, red with a gold hood like the boys wanted. He would dump this bucket of rust and just steal the one he’d seen at a junkyard on the south edge of Vicksburg, not well protected. The lot belonged to Man Mortimer and a junkman who lived on the premises. To steal Mortimer’s trash and make a classic from it would be a story, not just life. Moreover, he knew the junkman, who was a Christian and had cheated or betrayed or connived at no man.