Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Raymond resigned the profession without much remorse and took Mimi Suarez to live with him at a lesser house in Memphis. She too had been threatened by the old gang. Raymond joined the Latin band she sang with by first managing it and buying new horns and electronic refinements, then stepping into Malcolm’s old spot on saxophone. They rode the trend for Latin and were very prosperous, as bar bands went. Now they played the long casino job. Because Raymond knew the casino was evil. It meant nothing for a Christian visionary to live among the good and the comfortable, he thought. He wanted no cloistered virtue.

But he began seeing his splendid wife as the cause of his despondency, which increased until he played his way out of it. He felt unmanned by their lovemaking. It was all right when it was a big sin, but now that it was a smaller one undertaken with regularity, he felt weakened. He was both voyeur and actor when he took her, in all her spread beauty, but the part of voyeur was increasing and he knew he was a filthy old haint, as far from Christ as a rich man. He could have lived better with the memory of Malcolm dead, but as a stroke victim who might wander in through a door in Raymond’s head at any time, slobbering and gesturing, the guilt he inflicted was infernal, with no finality.

So far Raymond remained a hero to Mimi Suarez. Before Malcolm beat her, mainly for being beautiful and healthy and a drag on his addictions, she was attuned to the old precept of the Indian. Life was a river, not a ladder, not a set of steps. She knew something was wrong, but she was unconscious to living with a dead man, which Raymond in his current state nearly was. She knew many musicians looked reamed and dried and skull-faced, but she did not know that many of them, although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs. Pale, his black hair drawn straight back, deep startled blue eyes, Raymond was an older spirit gone into mind, a figure of desperate romance to her still. He hurt for things, and she pitied him as you might a deaf and dumb orphan around Christmastime.

He had chosen the very lake house, which he threatened to buy, for its late history of chaos. The landlord had told about these people proudly. He was in ownership of a rare legend. It was a poor county except around the huge lake and could not even afford much local color. Three years ago its tenants were middle-aged, a proclaimed witch and her sissy husband. The witch had been discovered leading a coven of teenage boys in turning over ancient tombstones in local cemeteries. She had plied the boys with oral sex at midnight. The authorities found the matter too stupid and nasty to prosecute. The youth were from good families the witch woman lived squarely among, in a grid of Eisenhowerera brick homes. Her husband stuck by her, and she meant to corrupt another bourgeois suburb in Shreveport when they left the lake house.

The next lodger was an embezzler who had drunk strychnine while the law pounded on the door. The enormous man, with his hound’s eyes, survived, but only as a shrunken wraith in draping skin at a federal pen in Missouri. He had betrayed hundreds of Baptist alumni at the school where he was president, many of whom still prayed for him and were shocked by his transformation. Heretofore he had been taken for brilliant and righteous. But years ago he had lost a teenage daughter, and the more generous said this must be when he turned against God and man. Many of his fellows remained confused, even when they reviled him. He had run with harlots in faraway cities, he had stolen two million dollars, he had become a scholar of hidden offshore accounts. One dear friend said that when he looked in his own bathroom mirror, he saw the wrath of evil just behind his own regular features. This friend was the man who brought the law to the door. He was devoted to the embezzler and thought him the best man he ever knew. He felt a Judas when he turned in his friend. Many spoke of broken hearts, but this man was an actual case.

Two weeks after the arrest, this man, ex — football coach at the college and a fisherman to whom every second on the water was dear, every bass, crappie, bluegill hoisted dripping from the lake, the effluvia of marine oil and gasoline at dawn, the shuddering motor, the skate across the glassy reds at evening. This man returned to the cabin, spent one night there, went out early in his boat and died. They found the boat making circles in the water a mile out. His body, the sixty-four-year-old body of a once second-team all-American guard, finally dead from an attack on the heart. A chorus of moans back at the little college, and agreement. They had never watched a sadder man. A man who perished from belief in a soul brother.

Then two springs ago, the landlord told Raymond, the realtors he was using, a married couple, moved themselves into this place on its small hill, with its vine-wrapped fence, its bee-loud honeysuckle, dwarf magnolias and the palmettos farther into the dark of the riverine bayous behind. At night you could hear the bull gators, hunka hunka , and the bullfrogs. Throats of bleating tin. At dusk, against this forest night, you saw a crane take flight, big as a spread greyhound and purest white.

The couple, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor, were no longer enthralled with each other, but they had a long fishing partnership. Penny sometimes dove from their boat to swim in the green-black lake. The water was still chilly from Tennessee streamlets into the Yazoo and Big Black, which fed the lake. She was in perfect shape and could stay underwater long distances.

In their slick boat, berthed at the eastern landing, was a cell phone. They were very prosperous in real estate, and they bought and sold lots in the pleasant venues remaining around the lake. Only local poverty stood in the way of a vaster development. It was a fishing, not a sports, lake. Bass fishermen do not as a rule care where they stay. Neither do they have much money left over after the outlay on the boat, trailer and tackle. They have brought their home with them.

The couple had dreamed once of an empire of condominiums at Eagle Lake, but that had stopped. Three times they had been threatened by angry callers. In this state live men and women nostalgic by age eleven. For things rambling, wooden, rain-worn, wood-smoked, slightly decrepit. The heft of dirty nickels. They flee to lakes from hateful pavements, concrete and glass. They are certain the great wars were fought for cheap fishing licenses.

More than by the telephoners, the couple had been stopped by the death of their young son in a school-bus accident. The lad was smashed, tossed. They had done nothing but fish since they lost him. Bass, crappie and bluegills. They favored the fly rod, an Episcopalian method in these parts. They fished too for catfish at night with a lantern on their boat. Monsters lay deep in this lake, so strong they could move their boat around like a sea fish when they were on. Gene and Penny frowned all the while now, as if trying to read a book in a foreign language. The book of rising each morning and for what? They hardly looked at each other. They returned to the huge cottage worn and sunburned.

When they ate at the awful restaurant, which some of the old fellows from the cove frequented, they were perfect consumers of its fare. They cared nothing for what they ate and barely noticed it. The old men thought it remarkable that the two of them had settled into this speechless apathy at so young an age, when two of the old fellows had waited decades to earn this pleasure from their own wives.

Sidney loved it. “They chanced to look at the other one and they’d kill the bastard, seems like. My word, it stirs the memory.”

Unbeknownst to the other, each had saved up the tranquilizers prescribed for them in their grief over their lost son. They did not begin taking them until the second week in the house, in a lull of energy for fishing. She complained that both the fish and the water smelled like birth, and then they came back to the cabin on the lip of the swamp, which smelled like birth and diapers, itself. Then the restaurant, where the bathroom was the same. But they could not quit going to these places. They began leaving clusters of fish, uncleaned, ignored, around the house. They were barely eating. They began drinking vodka with Gatorade.