Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

America is dreadful for the emeritus, or so Harvard thought. Once a god, a surgeon of few mistakes, now an eccentric out to pasture. His neighbors connected him to more charming days when doctors made house calls and bespoke themselves in soft benisons. Some might hit him for a drug now and then.

He began searching the aisles of the launch, through cinder and ashes, and finding bullet slugs. He knelt and studied them. Mushroomed.22 Magnums, 30/.30 and buckshot. Harvard raked through the coals and could hear the slugs rattling.

He cleared the embers, the broken stained glass, the half-pews, the quarter-wheel. He had once lived across the street from a man with thick glasses. He owned no car. The neighbors called him the Walking Man. He walked everywhere, morning and evening, and nobody knew his mission. He did not sing, laugh, play. He had no work except perhaps at the library. In his thick glasses, he seemed to be taken up with the traffic. Going and returning was a demanding event. You would stop to offer him a ride and he would brusquely refuse. He did not answer his phone. He once drank, but he stopped. He smoked, but he quit. He may have been a failed scholar, a torn philosopher. The thick glasses controlled him. Earnest and officious, even fervent, in his walk, without humor. Never smelled a rose. It was a free country. Harvard wondered why the neighborhood boys hated him so.

Sheriff Facetto and Bernard were in the bait store one evening in khakis and T-shirts and canvas shoes, a johnboat in the gravel out front. The weather was mild and the winter crappie season was in and they had in mind filling a freezer box with fillets for a county beer-and-fish picnic the middle of February. Big slabs lurked thick as necklaces in the brushy sinks near the spillway.

Mortimer in the back did not recognize the sheriff and his deputy through the storeroom window. But these men were not leaving until they learned the color of jig and depth for the slab crappie. The locals were leaning around freezer chests close to a potbellied stove with a good fire. Two of them were having a sport on the sheriff and thought he ought to find out himself about the jig color and technique. It wasn’t something you just handed over to a foreigner, it took years, many bad mornings, many frozen spines. Mortimer could see the skinny younger one, Bernard, getting angrier over this matter.

Mortimer recognized the sheriff and deputy the same moment he saw the thing on the top rack. Two full-size footballs secured in tandem by foot-long black strips of canvas webbing with Velcro at the ends. It was a life preserver, worn around the neck. Pepper’s old footballs. Sidney was having a go at invention. The weekend after the costume dance, when he had gotten with three large women for special tastes right out of Mortimer’s service, the experience of which, he told Mortimer and Lloyd, was like “rolling around in a warm room,” he had worn Mortimer’s silk bandit’s mask all weekend behind his store counter. The effect on a fishing Sunday was disquieting to his hungover clients, drinking beer rapidly before they could decide whether to stay.

Now Mortimer was staring dead-on at Facetto, through the glass and quite unknown to him. He could have rammed a bolo through the two-way storeroom mirror into the man’s very face without his ever knowing what nightmare had struck him.

Years ago a man had driven into the bait shop at night, hungry and with the inventory of an entire bankrupt sporting-goods store in a four-ton truck. It was hot summer, tree frogs and gnats having away at the air, aggravating the man’s thirst. He was broke, bankrupt and alcoholic, and he knew not where he was. He figured perhaps Kansas. Nobody else was in the store. He appealed to Pepper’s charity, spoke to him curiously, as if he might be the governor of the state, who was at that time a graceless yahoo whipping up racial purity among even lesser yahoos in confrontation with the Brothers Kennedy, who wanted one black man in the university at that time. He spoke as if Pepper were in charge of large fates and was known far and wide for his special attunement to the troubles of the little man in this often heartbreaking and deceptive land. He indicated waves of wheat and torrents of oranges out through the door. “I will do anything for a drink and a sandwich,” he told Pepper. “I have a truck full of sports equipment and not a dime. For a bottle I could give you a whole lot of sports equipment. Playground, floor play. There might even be fishing stuff in there, I’m sure there is. Isn’t there a good bottle, two bottles, and a hamburger?” He looked over at the greased meat and soggy bread under the heat-lamp row across the way. A man on the television was pouring down a frosty mug of beer so sweet it seemed to create new muscles of pleasure in his throat.

“First,” said Pepper, unmoved but interested, “I want you to get out a football. Go get it out of the truck there. Something might be waiting on you. Take your time and get a good football, your best.”

“My best football. I got one kind, the best. A Hutch. You got it.” When he came in with it, a bottle of Maker’s Mark sat beside a greasy burger on a napkin with a bottle of mustard next to it. Pepper seemed to have moved no place nor fretted. The man held out the big football.

“Now I want you to suck it. Suck this football. Get a lot of it in there.”

“Aw, man. Why, do you love football? That your game?”

“I hate it. Suck it, now. On in there, moan around on it.”

The man did, caterwauling and gagging. “Is that all right? God damn. You reckon it’s really pig hide?”

“Go on, get your drink now. We can be trading for a while now. There’s a place for you. Some old crazy man’s tree house, he left it. But the tree house is professional. The tree’d blow down ’fore the house would. He left meat around on the floor like. You goin’ to want to clean some with the critters comin’ after the smell at night.”

The man stayed for six weeks, fed from the store, seined minnows and caught grasshoppers and crayfish for Pepper, and stayed mainly drunk, high in the boughs singing with a transistor radio. There was a wire up to it for reading or coffee. Then he left, and the truck was all Pepper’s. He had sold off most of the gear to fairly delighted people who had hobbies. That is, outside fishing, hunting, weather discussion and church. But he kept the boxes of footballs in the storeroom. When he saw the boy children come along with their fathers to learn the way of the world, he would look at them with no expression and refuse them a football for their own. It was believed he kept the balls as a memorial to the ungodly humiliation he had wrestled from that bankrupt creature those many years ago.

Mortimer felt suddenly that he had to buy a new pair of shoes. He was doing this a lot lately. He felt a bit sick and nervous. In the storeroom thinking about the footballs, looking at the sheriff, he felt dirty and low-rent. He went out the back and almost immediately drove at breakneck speed into Vicksburg to purchase a pair of shoes. He wanted bright white ones. Perhaps a boot, a soft suede pair you could hold in your hands while you went off to sleep in any house and feel perfectly at home. The next day when he went out to talk to the lay preacher who kept the junk-car lot, he would buy yet another pair. Sandals and it cold. He knew he would probably never wear them, but still the excitement held.

Out in the bait shop, a geezer was telling the sheriff, “You got your chartreuse with sorty beige spots, throw it out there with a sorty small fireplug weight on her, and you’ll want a good rope size, say about like a venetian-blind pullrope on her, them slab crappie is big and mean with the teeth too like a band saw sorty.” Bernard the deputy was incensed, being an actual fisherman.