Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Melanie had seen the old man weeping for loneliness in the middle of the pier crowd one afternoon. This emotion did not surprise her, and she drove with Wren to get him a dog from the Vicksburg pound. Now, with Son, a furred brat needing all kinds of attention, Wren seemed better. Though the dog, an Australian cattle dog, was a neurotic bother who would dive underwater to retrieve a fishing lure. Sometimes Lewis and his bride, Moore, only seventy, came to paint or sand. They were both in chemo, but active and inseparable. Moore was always overdressed, like a creature of ancient television housewifery. She wore heels and a pearl necklace when she shopped in Vicksburg. She retained these habiliments when naked and mounted by old Lewis, and this fact somehow got out to the rest, but the couple were unashamed in this scandal. In fact, honored by it.

When Ulrich was told of the scandal, he blinked and seemed pained, showing teeth in a yanked smile of incomprehension. It was feared he was headed for a breakdown. Ulrich watched the dog Son constantly, always near tearbreak.

Among these denizens Melanie moved. Lean, clean beige skin, bowed lips. An elegance on loan from the cinema, they thought. She was frank, to the point, with a high brow under pulled-back white hair, a visage of permanent gravity. The men almost quit their lies when she appeared, and this disgusted Sidney Farté, who felt it squeezed him into a church pew. It had been the same with the near-saint Wooten, her dead husband, such a clean little statesman who had rebuilt the cove pier and given it handsome rails. Sidney felt censored around him and was overjoyed to hear, after Wooten’s death, that he had begun running queer in his last days at the Methodist college.

Sidney’s old papa, Pepper, ran the bait store and was even nastier than Sidney, who waited on him to die. Sidney suspected both of them were born without a heart, but this did not alarm him. He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.

After a month’s visit, his nephew from Yale had told him he was a poisonous old coot who ought to be ashamed of himself. This floored Sidney for a week, but when he arose again, it was to enjoy this legend. He had been at it for seventy-eight years. Four years ago, when his wife died, he stood, dry in his eyes, blaming her for the cold rain over the hole but loving the fact the burying minister was a Korean Baptist who would have horrified her. Her form of dementia the last years was suspecting that Koreans were taking over all the acting parts on television.

During the actual Korean War, Sidney had volunteered to kill Koreans, having never known they were a possible race. The army turned him down for premature belligerency. Nevertheless, Sidney lied that he slaughtered gooks of all stripes over there and this was what had changed him. Not the guilt but the present absence of such happiness. Melanie, who wanted to know about men and war, looked through him with piercing gray eyes. He could hardly stand her presence. Oh, he wanted to sodomize her and puke on her back, but he certainly didn’t respect her.

Even to Melanie herself it wasn’t clear why she stayed here by the lake. Wooten’s old boat hung by ropes in the carport next to her station wagon. She could live where they delivered drugs and groceries. She could live in a house next to Eudora Welty, the grande dame of American letters, over in Jackson, the capital city, if she wanted. They would say what a striking woman in the aisles of the Jitney-Jungle, and she could return to a home of bleached, ivied brick, three stories. But the land of wealthy widows and elderly divorcées was not hers anymore, and she feared it.

In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses .

NEAR THE BAD RESTAURANT A MILE AROUND THE LAKE lived the ex-doctor Max Raymond with his wife, Mimi Suarez, the Coyote. She was a good deal younger. They performed Latin jazz with their band at the casino in Vicksburg. The Coyote was Cuban, the singer. She had shining black ringleted hair, very fetching to men and to Melanie too, who adored watching her. She swayed and waved her arms, a torso in a storm of mutiny, the legs beneath her another riot trying to run away from her underwear. And the sheen of sweat under the lights. She was made for tiny dresses and flashbulbs under her face. But this was not the best. Her voice was. Men and women stared at her mouth when she began her singing, startled as if by a ghost flying from her lips. A review had once compared her to Celia Cruz.

But her husband, nearby with his saxophone, the one who enjoyed her pleasures, was a sullen middle-aged creature and seemed to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage. You could imagine him her jailer. His playing was vengeful, abstract, learned at some academy of the fluently depressed. He played against her, mocking or blaming her for her gifts. He had his fans too, but they were ugly people, sneering bumpkin punks and those who had always had the wrong hair. He seemed driven into low postures by her beauty, clawing at a pole to rise, spit, curse and hurl imprecations at her. During his solos, the rest of the band, men, would look up into the rafters as if incredulous about this tax on joy. His few smirking fans wished he would bitch-slap this Coyote woman once they were home. Because she was so fine, fine, and beyond. Bring her back to heel.

But although he held her responsible for some of his grief, Raymond was gentle to Mimi Suarez in their big decrepit cabin on the lake. He was a sort of Christian, but he despised striving, waited for visions. And was a poet. The Bible and whiskey on his desk, read randomly, drunk grimly. At one time he had thought Mimi Suarez would save him from all lost time. Her fire and rapture and flesh. But time had quit forgiving him and begun running short. He knew his poetry was not good, like his life, but he waited through the weak words for a vision and an act, as you would pan for gold by ten thousand wasted motions. He could get higher, higher to God, by his saxophone, an instrument resuscitated from his high school days when it was only a hole to hide his miserable head in. He needed music, the Coyote and God. And he needed to live close to evil. Mimi Suarez was unaware of this last need.

She did know that Raymond, as the attending physician, briefly, of her violent ex-boyfriend Malcolm, had destroyed the man by urging on his wish to commit suicide, a thing he would announce after beating her. Malcolm became the patient, the weak one needing help, while she sat in the waiting room, black and blue and cracked in the ribs.

Raymond saw her and wanted her. Both he and Malcolm were high on drugs, but Raymond’s drug was cleaner, Demerol straight from the hospital. He was certain he had identified intransigent evil in Malcolm. He dared him to be a man of his word and sent him off with several prescriptions. Malcolm succeeded only in giving himself a stroke. He lay now or stumbled, unable to remember nouns, no longer a songwriter, watched loosely by his old gang, who demanded a hearing on Max Raymond as a medical doctor.