Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Maybe he should call the sheriff. Mortimer smiled. Unbalance the man still more. He would say it was out of his jurisdiction, but Mortimer would keep after him. He dialed. He loved the whining answer, the trembling he heard, the remonstrations.

“Oh, it’s special all right,” Mortimer said. “Man mocking me like this. Got a whole new face to do it.”

“Why did he need a new face?”

“Don’t you even read the papers, man?”

“I read a lot of papers. You don’t want to forget who you’re talking to, sir. I don’t have to stand for this.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Getting out of hand over here. It’s just spooky. Thought you could speak to him.”

“What would I say to the man about his chosen face?”

“Most of us don’t have that option. I see your point.”

“You don’t just go up to a fellow and say, ‘Fellow, I don’t like your face.’”

“You don’t? Well I do, all the time. Too much, I guess. Thanks for your time, anyway.”

“Who is this again? Mort Durr?”

“Yes sir, Commander Facetto.”

“They don’t call me commander . Sheriff is fine.”

“I’m sure it is. Bye now.”

He had a vision of piling all his SUVs together some afternoon and burning them while the sheriff’s department and other fools looked on.

Mortimer knew Sidney was his man when he wanted him, and he was able enough to drive to the bait store on a Thursday when he could also hold down some soft black-eyed peas and corn bread at the bad restaurant. Sidney’s lackey Opal was minding the store, but this girl told him Sidney was down to the new boat in Farté Cove. When he drove by, he saw Sidney amid a great mix of men and advisers nearly working on the boat. It was another barge going up, all right, and now Mortimer wanted it, to sail it and make it smell good and have something for his whores. He would be well known on the lake and finally a pride of the region when he became an elder, because you were colorful then and people liked to see you prosper. Get nostalgic about when times were colorful and wilder and better. Let go because of history and what you’d done for it. A picture of him shaking hands with the law. A giant three-deck riverboat with paddle wheel in the background. Rest Home of Old Whores and Fishing. This joke hurt his liver when he laughed.

Still, he liked Dr. Harvard and the suddenly plentiful crowd. He didn’t know a third of them, must be twelve, fifteen down there. Sidney was off the deck but the center somewhere at the end of the pier, jawing. The boat would be his in the future. I made Sidney famous, thought Mortimer.

They heard the big stuff over at the camp on a Saturday afternoon. It was dynamite. The Ten Hoors had decided to make an island out of their camp, and nobody could stop them after they got the explosives permit, which was fairly easy. You can blow up your own place if you’ve room for it. Harvard, Lewis and Wren, working on the barge, with Roman and Raymond lifting heavy pieces for them, and Sidney looking on, heard the whumps .

They were blowing canals. They had hired this company, but the leader of the gang was a man who lived to change the earth. He was seventy and loved his job. He had not gotten enough of this in Korea with the marines, blowing away bridges and roads in the famous retreat from Chosin Reservoir that cost the communists one million dead. But this man had not veered, he was happier then than he had ever been, except for right now. Imagine making an island out of your place suddenly, he said. Imagine. Right here at home. It was going to take a lot of bomb here. Across the lake the men and Melanie and Bernice could see the sky get humps of black along its horizon line. Perhaps whole trees and their dust. Sidney hoped for an enormous accident if this was not one already. Limbs and ash and bone-spray in the air. A real shame.

Ruthna, Harb, Alexander and Whit arrived that afternoon. They had decided they could no longer abide the suburbs, especially since they could not make the house payments. They were something on the order of a middle-age commune and quickly agreed that nature and the lake were just the thing. It was changing them even as they hauled in their luggage, in fact. They had rented a modern, beamed ski-lodge affair, which gave the tourist the rare sense of having fallen off an alp into a steaming bog. They were near the Roosevelt lodge where Ulrich and Egan lived. When the dynamiting started, they were horrified. Their tall white sycamores trembled. They were hungover and in hell. Ruthna fell flat on the ground. Whit held his ears while his luggage scattered.

“He is always talking about his mother and father and Christ,” said Mimi once the scare had passed. Ruthna was becoming her confidante.

“Then he will be tired of talking, Mimi. All theological discussion will become shameful comedy. He has said people are snakes who love talking late at night about God. They don’t know God, but they surround themselves with other pretenders. These are direct quotes, I think,” said Ruthna, who knew Raymond too well.

“But what does Raymond have for acts? He has his saxophone, he doesn’t even have much money left. He has the friendship of punks and old men.”

“And you. Maybe he will do something for the orphans, like his mother did. He can’t forget her.”

“He tries, he speaks of his deaf absent father all the time, the gunner in the war against Japan. I think he was jealous of the orphans,” said Mimi.

“I’ve got to go. We’ll try to be sober next time we see you. Things have fallen apart and we’ve fallen here.”

“You’re at the right place, Ruthna. I don’t know anybody much who’s not decomposing. Even Max says people are hardly necessary anymore, and they have no acts. They tend to float away. It’s frightening.”

“If the Son of God has not visited us, Mimi, who are we? Am I just a lush and actress and tramp?”

“Well, he always said at least you were something, as long as you could stand it. I want to worship something bigger than me or I’m lost. It must be the music, but not always. Not at three in the afternoon. Only an idiot sings always.”

“My acts are all bad, Mimi. What about that? I have no imagination for a good act. Am I dead? I guess I’m normally courteous. So are the dead.”

“Max wants to see a chariot of fire or light one himself.”

“These poets keep wanting to suck the water out of the ocean with a straw.”

The boys were all driven out. It was hard to hide a car painted like this. But they did not want to see their new stepfather. They had seen their father for the first time since they were six and seven and wished he’d stayed longer. Though to them, Canada was just one of many places farther away than Sharkey County. He never heard about the car, and they knew nobody was in favor of small boys owning and driving such a machine. They imagined ogres of many types lost just behind them in their smoke, but nobody had gotten close. High speed over the gravel at the penultimate velocity, over rocks like low shoals of water. The amateurs are dead behind you. This is how the boys felt, and they had gone back to Benson & Hedges, long ones. They were also hidden in the last dry purchase of the swamp behind Raymond and Mimi’s house.

They waited until evening to announce themselves. Looking for Mimi’s titties through the window seemed beneath them now. They loved her singing too much. They sought her now because they were much growner. They had traded their mother for a car, and Harold was all the father they had left.

Lately Harold was picking up wheel rims and flexing with sledgehammers for his strength regimen. He ate two steaks and salads at a time, his acne went away, and he had found chemicals in the Big Mart pharmacy that cut and bulked you out. These were expensive, but the boys saw he did have a better body.