Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

The junkman, Peden, was a Baptist lay preacher, but cars were to him like whiskey to an Indian, his addiction, and they kept him poor. He had preached before to Harold about the naked Bathsheba when King David saw her at her bath and betrayed her husband, Uriah, sending him to the front lines of battle to die, so that he could possess her and know her forever. David who had all, Uriah who had nothing but Bathsheba. The story implied to Peden that Bathsheba had no choice. Who would not lie with the king? Peden would turn through the Psalms and say he had found the one David wrote to Bathsheba but that it was too dirty to read to the young.

But Sponce could get him to read it while Hare stole the coupe right out from under him. If he was successful, God would forgive him, probably.

The boys had real power over Dee, Harold Laird knew. She was guilty and served them. Now he was helping them mature. They were becoming, not overnight, but steadily more and more, Boy Scouts.

The day would come when the couple would stand in the yard, each actor glistening in happiness, the little boys especially. They would have a long talk with her and she would discover the truth that Harold Laird, genius mechanic, body man, paint man, was her future. He could see her in a bridal peignoir with her hidden softnesses all meant for him, but he couldn’t think long of this because he hurt himself, again and again.

John Roman saw Mortimer, looking pale and bent, in the aisle of the bait store. Roman was picking up a beer and pig knuckles and saltines for his lunch. The slab crappie were biting near the spillway. He drove a car this time, wanting to fill a freezer box with this succulence, which Bernice in normal times would broil or fry lightly. Eating didn’t get any better. It was so good that many thought the fish was French, crappé. Sac du lait is its name in Louisiana. Speckled, a frisky white steak swimming. They bite softly, like a suckling child. You take them with minnows and jigs. That was why Roman was in the store. But he was there also in curiosity about Sidney’s run of the store since Pepper lost his head.

Mortimer made a quick movement past some cans, knocking them over, and didn’t bother to set them back, didn’t even look back. Roman was fairly sure he was the man with the tongue in the Lexus, but that afternoon was vague. He and Melanie had not spoken since the event.

But Sidney in the Lexus was a thing of utter clarity. Even thrown into that rear seat in the black chariot between two sluts and caught unashamed like some mollusk in the light all of a sudden. Gray hairs on the chest of an oyster.

Roman had noticed how sensitive Sidney was to the pain of others. He was not sympathetic, but he was deeply concerned when he heard or saw the hurt, then took its measure against the longest disease of all, his life. He was just alert and, well, hungry for news of his fellows’ ills. He began to sort of eat the air and whimper over someone’s asthma, scabies, cancer, chest wound. You might make the mistake of thinking he cared, but it was simply an emotive topic and began the peristaltic writhings of his gorge, always about to blow from various bloatage. On the other hand, Roman was sickened by sickness.

He watched Sidney behind the cash register standing and watching him back as if he might be a common shoplifter. To his left in the mouth of another aisle, Mortimer walked out from his own shopping with a sea gaff in his hands.

“You know John Roman, Mr. Mortimer?” Sidney began, strangely formal. “He’s a veteran. Wounded. One of our brave ones from the lost battles.”

“Oh, I’ve heard. And he dates white women, I’ve heard. I have knelt on my knees at the graves of such white women. Is your name Ramp?”

“No. John Roman.”

“All right. Guess my name.”

“I know it. You’ve stood five feet from me.”

“Death by sea or death by mother. Morte de Mer or Morte de Mère. Merman, seaman, see. Did anybody tell you I now own a big piece of this store, John? Your feet are walking on my—”

Sidney began to protest. “N—”

“Oh for pity’s sake, sit down, Sidney. I was just going on.”

Sidney seemed relieved and did sit down on his proprietor’s high stool, a swivel chair new to his regime, fairly swank. He immediately jumped up and out in the air, screaming, holding his bottom. He pulled his hands from behind. Tiny points of blood on them. He held three or four map tacks.

Mortimer squalled, “He fell for it! Fell for it!”

Sidney grinned.

Who were they? What was this?

Roman thought they were like two little brothers. Who was leading who? His stomach turned. He drew off one of the ancient dusty cellophaned white handkerchiefs from a snap display and handed it over the counter to Sidney, who began eating off the wrapper and getting the cloth out with his teeth and fingers. A kid, a not unhappy kid in an old boyhood-prank cutabout. Buckwheat, Spot, Spanky. The other freckled goony-haired one. Alfalfa with centerparted hair, cross-eyed a lot. These two men were brats, that’s what they were. They were neighborhood bullies. I took three shots to the collar and jaw for them and their recesses.

The tall one with rock-and-roll hair was still holding on to that fish gaff, that shark gaff. What is the verb. The word? They are in collusion. Noun, I guess. Roman walked down the front steps with his new jigs and good minnows. Various geezers, Ulrich among them, were bunched at the base of the steps having at it.

“What was we looking at?” one said.

“The mother lode of weird,” said another customer.

Ulrich was in a bomber jacket with fleece and it eighty-five. He was real.

“Bad news with big preacher hair on it.”

“I don’t know what that cocksucker was. But this old fist would be his watch-out if he chanced to come close to me.”

“That man was crossbred with Lazarus.”

“That cut-up preacher?”

“I seen him before.”

“Said he ain’t said word one. Like he talked to a devil.”

“You don’t see nothing like that twice. But we did. That old boy in the Edwards football-game lavatory.”

“He seen maybe an unclean spirit, like.”

“Or trying to exorcise one, like.”

“You here one day and Stagger Lee cut off your face the next.”

“Or your head like Pepper. We ain’t never finishing talking on that one. Your hotshot sheriff wandering around like a mascot.”

Ulrich in the moth-eaten bomber jacket, the corduroy trousers much too big now in this skinnier madness, spoke again. “Spiders hold the altitude record for earth-bound creatures. Mount Everest.” He seemed on the verge of tears, then was over it. “Up there above the murder of men, these fine little creatures. Their thin legs. Having their families. Those delicate eggs. The winds must howl and howl outside.”

Roman was sorry he had not gone straight to fishing, but these were fine minnows. He might seine his own, keep a little pool of them behind the house. He headed off to his car.

When the fishing was over, he would be glad and sorry both to return home to Bernice. She was suddenly an old sick woman like Harvard’s Nita, and he felt just paces behind him, unable to drag her back from the maw of huge nonsense ahead.

The spider of Ulrich, he considered abruptly. Wind howling on the jagged mountaintop. Their little legs. Shuh. Down between them rocks. Icy winds the only weather, only world. Get aholt of something heavy, don’t never quit. New babies coming, feel the wind outside their shells already. Get born a half foot from ruin between a rock and another rock.

When you knew death was not far off, you always got a strange arrangement of the usual facts. You almost saw the spirit itself. An essence of the familiar, shifted. Sound, smell, dirt, sky. Thirty-three years ago, three times he had left where a sniper’s bullet struck seconds later. Then on a hot afternoon he had known the strangeness but was weary and, he knew now, curious. He had made no move and gotten shot.