Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Roman hummed around the remnants of a tune. “Time After Time,” Chet Baker’s version of airy sweeter days. He kept a pistol in his kit for snakes, but he knew he didn’t need that much caliber. You lived long enough, mildly on the lake. That was the plan. Nothing greedy or hungry about it, hardly even a dream. Now some sullen force came in to take away this small existence. No harbor. Us small craft, cracked against the wall by mean winds. Now he realized he had bought the pistol for men and lied to himself about it. Men in this new newspaper headline shoot-out, even on the school yards. How many niggers drove down a road like this to die fifty or a hundred years ago. They’d looked wrong, they’d whistled like wolves, they’d voted.

If, say, some fool in a smoked-glass car came up beside him running parallel and wouldn’t stop it, kept looking at him, he would pull the gun and fire a magazine through the glass. Death worked on Bernice at home. Here, Whoever, here’s some for you too. He had changed and hated his changes.

Pastor Egan lay silent. The other patient was watching a television show about a hospital as he lay there in the hospital. Maybe he wasn’t convinced enough he was truly here. Egan knew better. His inner voice had just returned and he liked himself again.

Episcopals, your rituals are babble , it muttered. Robed baboonery. Lukewarm, I spit them from my mouth, even while loving them and their gold and whiskey and cable-knit sportswear.

You are postwar, postmodern, posthuman. You sweep up, is all. The waste of the stores and storerooms find their place in each consumer heart to rot and reek. You are lukewarm, my people, my people. No decisiveness. Saith I the pastor. The man who owes thousands to the pimp who butchered him. Something large is in the woods. Not what you planned. You have not decided, so the thing in the woods is deciding.

IN THE PAWNSHOP WHERE THE SAXOPHONE RESTED IN its velvet-lined dark alligator case, Max Raymond had not been as misled as he supposed. His nemesis Malcolm, the afflicted past lover of Mimi Suarez, had gone by the window. He knew where Raymond was and intended to have a showdown with him but was in no way connected to the red Mercury Sable. He was looking for a weapon, probably a twelve-gauge double, when he missed the pawnshop and was led on by another rank of pawnshop signs down the way. He’d turned into an alley by mistake, tired from hitchhiking down Highway 61. Seven different rides and a grinding wait in all weathers, October going hot, cold, rainy and balmy, freezing. He could not drive, and his old gang did not approve of his pilgrimage.

Malcolm walked out of the mouth of the alley after Raymond had followed the car. Had he bought fast and, leaving Raymond dead behind him, taken the man’s car, he would have arrived at the house with Mimi Suarez away visiting relatives and singing in Miami. Neither he nor Raymond had seen the other. But they never lived a day without the other on their minds. In the next pawnshop was a more comprehensive collection of guns, and in this state of enormous sympathy for gun owner and hunter, where the legislature has even designated a specified season for dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbow, he found sympathy surrounding him on all sides. The pawnshop owner wanted stroke victims armed for whatever.

In the shop were the Ten Hoors and many bigger, meaner orphans and the now fifteen-year-old girls. It was not just a summer camp anymore. It was also less announced what it was now. They were not survivalists, nor religionists, nor paramilitary exactly. They needed guns, ammo, water and canned goods, barbed wire, and already had dynamite and four live grenades from the National Guard. The percussion kind, which they needed more of. You could add shrapnel to the outside of these very easily in the shop. The couple and the others liked Malcolm instantly and they had a much better gun for him. He left with them, he who was skimping on food to buy the twelve-gauge.

Carl Bob and Ulrich imagined they had a temporary grand theft going when they started up the luxurious pontoon launch that Harvard had conceived and largely built for Melanie Wooten and sailed it directly across the lake to preach to the orphans. But it was part Ulrich’s already by original charter, and the keys stayed in it all the time. The men were senile, sometimes raving and unkempt, but Ulrich had handled the launch several times before, and he did pilot well and knew the lake better than Harvard. Also he had no fear of water, although he would forget whether he could swim or not. Carl Bob Feeney simply couldn’t. He wore a fair barrel of life-preserving with two jackets, one in front, the other on his back. You couldn’t have held him under with a semi wheel rim and chains.

They plowed. This vessel required patience, although the Mercuries were powerful and magnificent. Patience and meditation were what it was all about. They had brought their own sermonettes to read when the orphans got aboard.

Ulrich would talk about the white teeth of animals, especially those of the lesser creatures. The traveling was perfect in late October, the sky orange-lit at midafternoon. The trees along the shore were still green, but a few were on fire in that incandescence born of lush summers, fat sopping roots.

Forgive us, little children, he rehearsed, he prayed. Our long years on this earth are an obscenity. They carried pictures of McJordan, the Jackson policeman notorious for shooting two smallish dogs, with a red X across his face. They had had it done at a LazerPrint in Vicksburg owned by an angry animal lover.

Ulrich wished he could sing, write songs and sing, but mainly just sing. So much so long in his bosom that could have been shared and vented to his auditors through the years. They would have liked him instead of fleeing. He wished he could sing all out, in a long exquisite howl for the animals and flight, but he was just croaking here and taking a nose hit now and then from his oxygen bottle. He had heard a story of a man, Roy Orbison, who sang so beautifully that he turned permanently pale. He wore nothing but black and dark sunglasses to memorialize his grief over his wife and children dying in a fire. That was a wonderful fate, thought Ulrich. He wanted to be pale and a bird with a deep throat. The animals would elect him their tongue.

We will have a ceremony in gratitude to the animals and then I’ll kill myself, he decided. Carl Bob Feeney bore straight ahead with his stare at the far shore, trying to piece together any orphans’ tableau on their pier that might be ready for them. He could not see well, though, and he was looking at a crowd of heifers with buzzards over them and trying to figure. Carl Bob loved the launch as his, an almost bold late gift to his years on the land with his dogs and cats. Loved his nephew, Byron Egan, a prince of the spirit, a boon relative. Blessed his sister, Egan’s mother, for providing him against this darkness. Sometimes old Feeney forgot he was not still a devoted Roman Catholic. And sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants.

A greyhound, alert to kindness, stood next to Melanie on the pier. It was a gift from Facetto. They had come out after loving and discovered the two ancient loonies had taken the launch. They called Harvard, and he was a little concerned but said gruffly that he did not care to come down to the pier if the sheriff was there. He told Melanie, she thought bitterly, that it was consuming all his care to watch his beloved wife of all these years slowly slipping away. He had begged her not to smoke, to exercise, to eat better. So here they had the results of another individual, fully warned, taking her own road in mild spite against the odds in the newspapers. Betting on Harvard University upsetting Alabama in football. Oh, to be holding her hand again when they were twenty-three! Melanie said that sounded right and it made her cry.