Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Raymond began to relax during his break, when he did not see Mortimer in the dancers or tablesiders or anywhere costumed or uncostumed. He settled into a fine jar of Wild Turkey on ice, with a soda and lime to the side, and began his lean, bumped by a few fans, those angry and sullen laggards to whom he could play no wrong. Some of them had homemade CDs of only him. Anybody could make a disc now. Our great democracy. Perhaps he and the band were due one. This Latinismo thing would fail, he feared, but it would always be around as long as there were butts and rumbas. It was a shame these baby nihilists creeped him out so, with all their love, and always too early drunk, and their females too, little skanks latched on to the wrongest punks in town. He could not know he was looking straight at his own youth. All that was missing was a war and a pet wolverine.

Beside him was a strange figure, unmasked, hooking his drink with a claw made out of only natural hand, and moaning, perhaps a jester ignored for all his private comedy. Except for some vision half suppressed since the awful night with the bones, Raymond was not aware that Malcolm was lakeside. Now, with a thrill to the pits, Max Raymond recognized him, accompanied by the leaner and sterner couple to his right. He turned away quickly. It was Mimi Suarez the three of them were watching, onstage alone now with piano, bass and drums. Malcolm was the only one who watched with love. The other two seemed saddened by her ballads and intent on suffering. As if they were reviewing their own lunacy, their own love, their own cause. They each seemed alone. Separately crucified once more. Penny and Gene Ten Hoor.

Raymond would play the rest of the night with his back to the audience, like an old idol of cool, Miles Davis. His punk following would think he had outdone himself. He hurried back to the stage now, through couples panting and sweaty. A college football man misunderstood Raymond’s need and slammed him across the shoulder. He went down into the legs of a screaming mulatto woman bigger than he was. He rose through her kicks while somebody screamed, “He’s with the band, bitch!” He wondered where this had commenced as her curses followed him through the crowd of masks, Reagan, Nixon, dancing together even without music. Donald Trump’s rubber face on a very short man. Even Alan Greenspan. Hillary Clinton pouting but with mouth open, perhaps raving, pop eyes. Momentum rang through him like an urgent telephone somewhere ahead. He rushed past John Roman with a handkerchief to his neck and then Man Mortimer. He could not credit they had been dancing together, but he did not slow. Drugged women passed like a discord of mannequins. Or was he drugged? When his head cleared, he was high but did not know quite what floor he stood on. It was the curling bandstand.

As he held life dearly, so he also yearned to leave it. But now he would play himself somewhere on the instrument. Play it well, with heart and no more belly lint and asthma.

Now, when the music began once more, it was John Roman, dancing, who was incredulous. His partner was Mortimer, uncostumed except in a silk bandit’s mask and the slick beam-shoed costume he felt compelled to wear against all contigencies. He raised his hands and shuffled violently, an enormous grin on him. “Can you boogie? Can you do the dog? Get down, get down, John Henry! Oldies but goodies. C’mon c’mon c’mon.” He was an uncommonly bad dancer, Mortimer, and here with a solitary black male with silver hair, he did not mimic one well either.

Just behind him, perhaps betrayed in partners, was Sidney Farté in a very large old-timer’s party suit and vest, white shoes. He troubled the floor with some spastic revision of anything right, perhaps clogging or just stomping. But he was happy and grinning and drunk. Looking on the back of his bad influence, and not a finer man in the county, old Man Mortimer. He the man!

John Roman ceased the dance and decided this was the worst possible outcome, to have danced himself to Mortimer. Nausea struck him. Danced to hell and didn’t even see. He wanted home to Bernice very badly. Old Sidney slid by, bumping in a kind of march, hands in the air, aimed toward a table where blond, blood-lipped whores laughed at him. This was enough.

“John Roman, the night is young! Come on now, man. You ain’t showing us nothing!” called Mortimer. “We in the Club! Get in the Club! Club of the Now! ” He clamped his hand on Roman’s sleeve, and there was a too-mighty squeeze. Roman tore away. It was a nice coal-brown sports coat with a rep tie. Mortimer’s fingers themselves seemed coiled and toothed like serpents.

Roman did not realize he was bleeding from the wrist until he was in the car and cranking up. He leaned his head on the steering wheel. He felt sad, weak, small, eking away. His wife would die, he would be one leg in the grave. No more dancing. No song would speak to him. His wrist was wet and he raised it curiously. All his hand was drenched, sticky in its white dress shirt. He felt the pain and now saw the gash. What vicious tiny thing had snagged him? Then a car passed him in the lot with two lit skulls on the shelf of its rear windshield. Roman groaned.

I used to be a man. People did what I said. I advanced under fire. I had dignity. I walked toward crowds with my head up. Now I hold hands with nonsense. Gnats of spite around my head. I do not know where the fight is or where to give up.

Now he supposed he would have to kill Mortimer or start back going to church. With that ponytailed fool Byron Egan. Now that was a man who might have laid a couple out in his days. Lost his old uncle now. Like Roman had almost lost that nice old child Melanie Wooten for a friend. He started the car and drove home to hold the hand of his wife, Bernice.

Chet Baker was on the tape deck as Roman drove. Nothing. A painful irrelevance worse than silence especially in the love ballads. They seemed a fraud, they didn’t hurt enough, there wasn’t any shame in them, only that whimpering lapdog studio tribute to some ghost broad.

Vines climbed all over his housefront and there was a dim light within. Bernice would shoot the motherfucker, no doubt of that. And she’s still got a God, last I asked. I ain’t bothered her with him. She’s got the chemotherapy, she’s got the sleeps, she’s got the nausea and the marijuana pills, the THC. Now she’s a legal junky, but not even happy when she’s stoned. She’s got the baldness that’s humiliating her. That wonderful silvery hair gone. She didn’t want to look like no fortune-teller or woman wrestler .

All she wanted was her man and a house, waited half her life to get it. Set in the depopulated reaches of west-central Mississippi, Louisiana across the river. Swamps and flood on both sides, bayous. The great fertile lake that Roman had fished so good, so long. There was no starving here unless you meant money. People got by on enough. Too much electric have-to greed out there anyway. Roman thought he had gotten rid of the disease of want. His life was simple, near good fishing water. In their house he and Bernice shared the easy devotion that comes when you wait and wait. Little rhythms, unspoken speech of love. It seemed not to matter where a mad god was. They had earned this shelter beyond his wrath. Roman knew he was alive somewhere, this god. He had seen his work. And now he had seen Mortimer’s.

He held the handkerchief to his wet hand, his face cold. His shirt ruined too. Roman had seen such monsters in the service. Only question is whether Mortimer’s worth doing any kind of time for.

Chet Baker, what is it? It was always there, but we hear it only now and then .

Bernice was asleep.

One day you say I’m not moving, here is my country, I can’t help it, I’ve fallen into my place, no budging. I’ll die here with the ghosts of my old everybody. My Indians, my Africans, my uncles and aunts. Where half was grief, home was at least a hole to have it in.