Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“Tire iron, you say? No, I don’t lend out.”

At this Mortimer’s right hand flew up and a ring-mounted razor swiped across the man’s chin and lip so there was an awful amount of blood. The man squalled through a dark mustache of it dripping over his hands, at his chin, his jowls. “It’s the rudeness, man. Everywhere. And you worked for me, forgot me, let your real self loose on me out here.”

The man recognized him then. He was astounded by his thinness and wild high hair. Puny Italian sandals and no suitable beach sand for hundreds of miles.

Ronny watched for Mortimer’s return and other strokes. Waited on the story of Mortimer’s fury. He could not believe his own lips bore the tale, pouring down his shirtfront. He did not know why it had angered the man to find him ungiving about the tire iron.

Mortimer walked in on Peden and his father. They were paging through Peden’s file box of calendar art. Motorcycles or cars with women. Lazing across a car hood, handlebars, a fender. On one a man’s great tongue against thighs, scrawled there by a jokester. Worship of moving parts, combustion, bodies these two could covet. More than a spaceship or a moon landing, this local steel mesmerized them. No destination but the thing itself.

They barely recognized Mortimer.

“I need meth to tide me over. To end the blues and the nasty world out there. You know how it is, getting well,” he began straight off.

“You at the wrong place. No meth for three years,” Peden told Mortimer. He looked at Mr. Mortimer’s face. “Even when I sold, you wouldn’t find me at home doing it.”

“Pawn guy said you holding.”

“That man is dead, the holding man,” said Peden.

“Peden is now a Christian minister. He won’t even touch a beer,” said Mr. Mortimer.

“Man, you got to help me past this day. I might kill myself. Myself .”

“Which pawnbroker?”

“The guy, man. Tattoos. Civil War sabers, metal detectors.”

“Who are you?” asked Peden.

“C’mon. You know me.”

“No I don’t,” said Peden.

“Everybody knows me.”

“So?”

“I exist, man.”

Mr. Mortimer gathered himself to Peden’s side. “You could be a demon to be dealt with by the Lord.”

“He would know me. He would.”

“But I don’t. You’ll have to forgive me.”

“I don’t.”

“I believe I killed somebody but it was in another country.”

“God help you, you haven’t gone anywhere,” said Peden.

“I exist, man,” said Mortimer.

“I took you for somebody you’re nothing like. Now I can’t remember that person. You’re the demon itself. I’ve seen them before and you too,” said Peden.

Peden looked at Mr. Mortimer, the father, who had made a noise. He was actually squirming, lost in humiliation. It had been thirty years since he had reckoned on the fact his son might be an absence, or all things present at once. Against the chickens in the back window, he had watched the profile of the boy and comprehended him as a dangerous nullity, although he could not have voiced this. He knew only that he had been frightened and should be dying of shame.

Egan approached the orphans’ camp slowly. He had the dogs in the car. Ulrich’s death had nearly broken him, and he thought what he would find at the camp might do the rest of the job. The camp was strangely silent and marks of destruction were everywhere. Two dead orphans were floating near the bridge to the northern entrance, shot at close range in the head.

Trembling Egan left the dogs in the car and crossed the bridge. Exploring the grounds, he saw no one, though he thought some orphans might be hiding in one of the buildings. Finally old Pete Wren waved to him and came out of the assembly hall. He was living at the camp lately as a counselor emeritus, had worn a bathrobe during the whole catastrophe. He told Egan everything had started because of some new arrivals: two big black inmates from Norfolk, Virginia, and Paterson, New Jersey, and a white boy from South Mississippi who had made himself an orphan, who had killed his own father after watching his mother die of alcoholism, but was exonerated. Wren seemed curiously calm but wouldn’t stop the irrelevancies, Egan thought.

“I came over because I was inspired by the church services held by you and Peden that woke up a thing in me, to act, to do some good in my old age, because I stole my cousin’s good name. It felt good to drive here and be taken right in. I slept the best sleeps I had slept in years on my hard simple cot.

“There weren’t many rules. Before long, I began to find out there might not be any rules. Gene or Penny were always talking about love and trust at the center of the universe and how vigilant we should be against the Old World, as they called it, but the children didn’t seem to listen. They also seemed to have sex a lot, and about where they wanted it, fairly loudly and known to the children, and I could not, for the life of me, decide the lesson in this because it did not appear purely natural man-and-wife devotion but a sort of scheduled thing like a cup of coffee. They said they had been instructed by the Ultimate Pain of the bad life they’d had before now.

“Then the orphans gathered and all moved into the main building one night. They said they weren’t Oasis anymore. They were Ataxes, which spelled attack and from an axis of high consciousness about children or something like that. A new bad spirit was into them, little and big, led by those black boys and the boy who’d killed his father. Somebody took a random shot at Gene and Penny trying to start a sing-along. I thought the shot was a firecracker at first. The big boys said they had learned things about who was the enemy and they were getting down serious to it. Everybody on the other side of the lake was bad. They had been using the girls and enslaving them, then turning them away when they were hurt and no good to them anymore. Gene and Penny had to know about this and didn’t tell them.

“One of the black boys, the one from Paterson, put a pistol right in Malcolm’s face and kept it there. The smaller rough boy told him to sit in the chair. True, I have had my lifetime of trouble with black boys and men. They were rude, sassy, out-of-the-way tricky when a straight yes or no would do. Had all the tricks especially for old white men because I guess they want up on the old colonel of the plantation. Rheumy-eyed, can’t take care of himself, looking for somebody to open the door for him. But a cigarette, is that too much to ask when they have a box in their pocket? Then you say you don’t have a light, and they push out a dead lighter to you so you’re lighting your cigarette but it’s dead. These guys are rigged for whites like that when they’re fifteen. Do they learn this at the knee of somebody, or at church, or special power groups? They’ll go to prison and they come out with more cigarette tricks and are losing the war every day. Minister Farrakhan, can’t he do something? They need love even with old bigots like me.”

“Wren, you old fool, shut up,” Egan said. “What happened here?”

“I’m saying it was them and Leopold, the white boy who killed his father. He was a Mississippi Irish criminal. You’ll see a strain of that pop out in the best families who’ve been mild and rich for three generations. Then the guns come, the screams, murder and suicide. Anyway, Leopold was quiet but in command because he had the blood on him. What most in the world he hated was adults messing with children. He was some rough animal who had been passing for mild. You’d think only an inner city could breed that coldness and that easy killing. No manners, a hiss for a voice, and big dead eyes greener than green. Became his daddy’s monster, a stroke of revenge, no mercy. He and the black boys twinned up in some awful memories together. They would say the war was coming, and in a war there was no guilt. Nobody would ever find out who did what in a war. You had freedom to kill and hurt your slave masters. Nobody looked at me, and I’m glad they didn’t.