Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

The sheriff spoke as if nothing had been heard, nothing mocked. He said to Sidney, who was smirking behind the counter, “You don’t think the football contraption is a bit in bad taste, considering your father’s murder?” He quieted the air. Something like church in there now.

“Family tradition is a man’s own lookout, like his choice of faith, sir.”

The sheriff did not miss the sir and was astounded that Sidney spoke of faith at all. He was slow to anger, but these crackers were getting confident around him.

“The faith of your fathers is a chicken hawk and everybody knows it, Sidney. Tradition.”

“I don’t guess you’ll be welcome in my store from now on unless you got papers, friend. But by the way. They’re taking slab crappie with a light cork, a foot deep on a fuchsia and frog-green jig, sometimes tip it with a small minnow. I seem to be all out of those substances at the moment, but good luck.”

Bernard and Facetto proceeded to the spillway, where there was another tribe entirely, honored to have the sheriff and his man fish elbow-to-elbow with them as they waded the little rapids over gravel and worked the pools with a light spin cast, lent them jigs and corks hand over fist in that almost belligerent hospitality the state of Mississippi is famous for. The two felt much better and had a full chest before long, and it was splendid to get out of the cold water, rip off the waders and toast in the car, alternating on hot espresso and cold Louisiana beer.

“I’m sheriff of these folks too, thank the Lord,” said Facetto.

“The truth. Folks is all right. It just seems tense at the lake nowadays.”

The sheriff grew solemn. Melanie. Did the deputy know? Or was it something else he meant? Trouble at the orphans’ camp; the immolation of the oldsters’ barge; the disappearance of yet another pair of girls from Oasis. Old Pepper’s seated corpse, bleeding in ropes from the neck while a football stood for his face. The tracing of that jackleg preacher Byron Egan to a methedrine ring of long years standing; a ’48 Ford coupe reported stolen from the St. Aloysius Junkyard and replaced by a filthy rusted-out car of exactly the same vintage. And that stolen car had been reported running down scarcely known county roads, driven by minors, and then parked in a cemetery near the home of Dee Allison, the sex bomb, about whom a groaning man had said, “She’d fuck a snake just to hurt it.” She had four kids, great legs and other acreage, but the talk was she was getting married soon, right there in the cemetery. Shut your mouth. Right in it.

MORTIMER HAD FOUR DREAMS IN A ROW ONE WEDNESDAY night. He had performed a small amount of manual labor in his runaway years, and the work itself was nightmare enough, although it trained him never to go thereabouts again. In each dream he was fired from a different job, jobs he had done in real life. Offshore drilling in Louisiana. Lumberyard. Car salesman. Offshore drilling again off the Chandeleurs out of Gulfport. In each dream the boss man came up and said, “Get out, that’s enough of you.” Then came a fifth dream in which his own mirror told him he was an impostor in the body of Conway Twitty. Then his mirror fired him. But he killed it. A funeral was held with a coffin and pieces of glass. The woman and the boy showed up. They were trying to have a funeral, but her father was late and they could not start. Mortimer said, “He just can’t find his clothes, that’s all. You don’t know the outfit for a mirror funeral.” But he knew he was lying. The news was that her father was coming naked. So they waited at the graveside next to the hole. But instead came Frank Booth, with whom Dee Allison had betrayed Mortimer. They walked in naked like two crabs locked together. Booth was saying, “Please help me. I can’t pull it out of her. Somebody’s got to cut. Help us.”

Mortimer woke in horror, the sun streaming in his window. Yet he had only a few moments of relief before he was in full need from waking life. He was going to have to cut again. This matter was no longer spontaneous. He knew exactly what he would do when he saw the junkman Peden again. Fire him? In his dreams. Peden, his lackey, who owed him money.

Peden was a Protestant. Why then, Mortimer mused, did he spend his idle time making graven images? What did graven mean? Of the grave, serious, heavy? A graver, he graved nearly all his free time. Over there graving, is what. Peden carved wood. He was one for animals like Mrs. Wooten and her glass. Mortimer said out loud, “You look at me, I don’t seem the type to go about having such thoughts on my own, up high in my Navigator, this new green buggy, swank, but look again, looker. I have these thoughts.” In fact he could not quit having these new thoughts that gave him a hand on the common man and the old life he was rushed from by such forces as he now despised.

He recalled the mobile phone he had bought Dee once and the first time he saw it in her hands, in the BMW he had also given her. Must be two years ago, they were new then too. He thought the phone, deep red, was very intimate, and her words, it didn’t matter which ones, excited him. He saw now the red phone in her fingers, her fingernails very red, her toenails too, and then he imagined the razor scar down her thigh and he could not stand it. He wondered if she would ever forgive him, how crazy he was to do it. But that red phone next to her fingers, her lips.

He wondered would there be a day when he would open the car door for her to get in, and on the backseat would be her two younger boys sitting there. He could play with them, make new games. There would come a day he could change, nobody’d recognize him. He might even resemble nobody at all, or a pleasant television star. These things happen. You can get a lot with money.

He thought of his sequence of good cars, and then the whores. His work was his play. That’s what they said of players. He was either moving or flat-out dead asleep, it didn’t matter under what roof. Probably he was a sea shark, even if he feared the sea. Death by sea. Life by eating a great many others. But he had his kindnesses. He was not tight. He set a plate for the unlucky, like the lay preacher Peden. Until this car, under his eye, rode off. Just the core of the apple of his eye, it just rode off, and its mud-bottom rust-faced sister is your date. Old preacher boy Peden eating from the plate and whittling his idolatrous beasts and strumming his psalms. Great hell, he lives there! Otherwise it would be Haven House or a box in back of the Salvation Army. This man’s been passing for a sound old junk general too long, he’s got himself into trouble. Well here comes Not Hardly , Mortimer said to himself, dressing for battle. Peden has his coming.

The shack at St. Aloysius Junkyard was an old shotgun house weathered to a pale of gray and re-tar-papered and tarped in spots on the roof for rain. The two snows they had in the decade, the edge of a horrendous ice storm. It was warm inside, burned a good modern Franklin. It was electrified, telephoned, a small pawnshop refrigerator did its duty for beer or milk or bacon or the whole old hams Peden often bought at the discount grocery. A stove of propane. Peden liked to keep a soup going during a major bender. He would make the soup days in advance, and it worked so that he was not detected incompetent until a fire broke out or he drove some elected junker queen all around the lot honking the horn and plowing into even more terminal junkers. The law was not necessary. A neighbor black fellow phoned in. Grandson of the owners of the house and the original property years ago, still proprietary although sold out. Then Lloyd or others would come and settle Mr. Peden, clutching his Bible and tearfully spouting out hard plainasyournose truths from the Book of Revelation.