Yonder Stands Your Orphan (11 page)

“A girl? Why?” asked a man in a wheelchair. He had a deep crush on Melanie Wooten and was the angriest of all.

“The temperament. This was meant to inflict the most hurt on something delicate and painstaking and artful. A more feminine principle. If she had any intentions at all outside of fury. I think so. It took preparation.”

Dee Allison was very attracted to the sheriff, who was thirty-six. When he slipped back and forth from southern to East Coast accent, she felt at home. She was good at her work that way. She spoke illiteracy and literacy, depending on the patient. They had all kinds at Onward now. Even
Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, Pakistani. The ones who first owned the tourist courts had gotten old right along with the rest. There were the few vicious hicks too, of course, who had never had a right day and intended to live until they found one. Facetto looked directly at Dee's bosom and blinked in approval without being coarse. But he returned his look to the victim here, Melanie, and held up an uncrushed zebra figure, crystalline and delicate.

“This is art. It is precious, priceless. So we are talking sacrilege of a sort. There may be even religious overtones.”

What an ass. Dee thought of another nasty T-shirt she had ripped off her son and scolded Harold for, which made him beg and beg forgiveness. He had not read it, bright white against black black. Medium-size. But it belonged on a bumper sticker.
If I Had Wanted to Hear an Asshole I Would Have Farted
. It seemed appropriate now.

The ex-doctor Raymond was having tenderer moments with his wife, Mimi Suarez, and she was learning to love the big cottage. Now she knew that animals listened when she sang on the back stoop, because she saw them hearkening. Once two little boys were hidden, doing the same thing. The boys were in love. It was a difficult love somewhere between the need for an actual mother and the affection a pagan yard ape might have for the Madonna, with the delicacy of all women's laps and breasts. The voice was what brought it all together, though, the night when they first saw her and she didn't see them, out under a wild magnolia with its pod mulch underfoot, and she was bare-breasted. In no boastful way, no criminal way, no way wicked. Because who would she be seducing?

Max Raymond no longer liked to think of himself as a former doctor at all. He had met and chatted with a real
doctor, Harvard, many times, and he understood that much of his life consisted simply of a failure to fail. Now he was a saxophonist and bad poet. He thought more and more of his mother, was working on writing about her. Most thoughts that were any good, he recalled, were merely getting frank with an ancient truth.

His mother was a powerful Baptist who thought constantly of the Lottie Moon Mission and its Chinese orphans. His father was a former gunner on a battle cruiser in the Pacific, but his anguish over this remained in the form of absence. Not drink or drugs, certainly not psychological trauma, but a refusal to be anywhere much if he was not firing a gun at a Zero, the height of his life and the depth of it too. He had been aired out by a halo of lead, and his steps on this earth were light. He was not big and muscular. He remained spidery like a distance runner or a tall jockey.

Ma was navy too. That burnt-leather voice. She sucked on Old Golds, Fatimas. Smoke ran out of her like a bombed ship. She had mated twice, bringing forth Raymond and his brother. By her will, Max arrived ten months after conception. Of average height although a little thin, he was born discouraged. Too big for grade school, then suddenly too small for life, he felt.

Raymond's mother would grab him by the throat when he was a lad. “Love the Lord, you little nit.”

“Ma, these swimming trunks are too big.”

“Excuse me, but I am feeding the heathen orphans of the world. What is your difficulty now?”

I was sent to my room to beg the Lord to have me
, Raymond wrote, hitting whiskey straight from the bottle but only twice an hour.
When Ma got the sad fairy organist at the church fired, she said, “What he is stays between him and his Lord. But his music blent poorly.”

It was the movies
A Mighty Fortress, The Life of Luther, Ben-Hur, The Robe
and others she approved. Then, for myself, I slunk to the old Royal Theater in Jackson to see the vampire films and their women breathy and innocent in their nightgowns. Like a pink supper in the rainy Carpathians. I had a mental woman, imaginary I mean, who wrote me letters from Dracula's castle, surrounded by her friends, the beauties from the Bible movies, also almost naked and looking down at their Jew sandals. My replies to them would do whole peoples in. “I've had it with them. My dears, the French must die.”

I didn't have much left for the local girls except Ruthie, a majorette, who slapped me for my thoughts and told Ma, now small and whispering like a husk in the wind. She forgave me because Ruthie wore her legs bare, spangled and strutting like a field slut. It was staggering what a humanist Ma became when Pa stepped out the last step. Her mercy took on the softness of a hound's ears. I don't know if this was love or only understanding.

Now that you're dead, I have your life to play with, Ma, Mary Perkins Raymond, and forgive me for it. Guide my mercy. Endlessly rocking, and she died. She did so much good she was never bored until the time of her final sweetness.

Ruthie did love Ma and her memory. It was not this writer but Ruthie who put flowers on Mother's grave once a month. I brought along a cup of steaming coffee from the truck stop for her tomb, unable to think of much else she enjoyed but cigarettes and orphans and Baptists. And Pa with his own tomb right beside her. I believed he had missed so many
Japanese with his gun back in the forties that, disheartened, he could not smell the roses. Could not find the silver lining. I did not know a firm thing about him. A near acquaintance of his informed me that Pa was stone deaf from cannon every minute he knew me. I always thought he was a mystic. He couldn't hear, he didn't want to see us, he ranged solitarily I still don't know where. The money he returned with, it smelled like dogs sometimes.

I did not throw myself on Ma's tiny form in the coffin, but I wanted to. They keep you so far away with that last taxidermy. So much I had not done for her, never mind her orphans overseas. I was now forty-five, married twice. But I was still a boy in some kind of trouble in the room, needing to pray for myself in a smaller room, needing to regret this worm of me. I lost my bones, it felt like. They had spilled clicking around my shoes. But I was not given to histrionics, as Ruthie was, her whom I never married, regardless of all her postures.

Ruthie sinned, again and again, and cheated at cards, even stole cattle. Deceived her boys and her husbands. Then she would pick her Sunday and appear in a small church where theater had never been. She was now sorry in public for everything, everything. In a new meek dress accenting nothing. From her midheeled sensible shoes.

“I have sinned in automobiles, airplanes, under trestles, in warm ponds with cattle watching. This was partly liquor, that liar, or the chemical cocaine, that serpent. I was Jezebel who fell out of her window onto the street and the dogs licked up her blood. I have betrayed my marriage, over and over. I played
all evil rock bands that there are on the stereo, at deafening volume. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can you call this life?” Everything she should have whispered, she yelled. The churchgoers were cowed. Small children laughed or applauded.

Christ loved sinners so, better than the pious, she went on. He loved the hot blood that flowed under his cool fingers. She'd brought her own sermon and redemption with her.

I barely realized I was mad for her. There was a time, very tender, when that was possible. Just as John Roman is mad for Chet Baker, who was made for love and for horn, Chet at the end with toothless bony soul. Fell out of a window and died, I think, after being everything God gives a man. He never played the horn loud, never. Never showed off. What an ear. No running around jagged, like me, he was mad for love. To be more like Chet Baker in my heart. My good Christ, give me talent please, no more art. I loved Ruthie.

I was a success, but wrongly, deeply. Each year there was a new record of giving to the Lottie Moon Mission fund led by my mother. And I needed an appointment with Dr. God, as the Oak Ridge Boys sang. The better part of my malformation was my own. Beyond the saxophone I had no dreams. Well, a few cigarettes and looking out the window. I wondered what my essence was all through med school. As if I had one. Then the Peace Corps and back like a lost hound to the delinquent Ruthna, the hospital bed, the narcotic line. She now called herself Ruthna of the suburb Rathnar. What in my glassy delirium to do except begin dating her? But is there
anything wronger than your young daydreams coming true?

Her man Harb got into a wreck. Harb, his woman and car stolen and defaced. And Harb striking me, the last blow an uppercut right through. He began hitting me in the face right then in the hospital, where I worked but was currently a patient on fluids. Now was I sorry I had run with Ruthna? Harb was a small man even at bedside. “Harbison! Harbison!” I appealed to his better nature. Such names as they give down here they make you desist when you call them out. “Have patience, man,” I pleaded with him. “I'm already in pain every minute. She hurt me too, remember? Would you like a high heel in your ass? In your dead mother's bed?” While she spoke, standing over me, in some unknown tongue of lechery.
There's no use looking like me
, she said,
if you ain't going to act it out
.

Her old lover Crews was showing off his mangled leg in the parlor and collecting pills from visitors far counties away. This was Ruthna's infamy. Nobody wanted to miss her next spree. It might be her last.

There is no doubt I carried my same love for her straight to Mimi Suarez. My Coyote. But Mimi is innocent. The band was playing at Nubie's in Memphis, and I had to have her. I was mainly good, I thought. I was no longer a racist. I knew I could exceed their saxophonist simply in pure fury. Yet I disliked most people. If diseases could come attached to something like an ambulant dummy, I might still be a doctor. But her hair meant more to me than . . . Well, there was Malcolm in the way, and I took more than his spot in the band.

Few liked me at first, with my hunching toward the Coyote as she drove her hips. You can play a lot of jazz in a mambo, actually begin lessons and finish right on the spot, which is jazz. But I opened my eyes to find myself on her, horn grinding away on her thighs. She moved away, threw out her brown arms, to howls of execration from the front row and farther back. I was middle-aged, that was the main horror! But women often like a mean man. Those women who write to killers in prison. It must be for those punks like writing a letter to God. Mean is the diploma of the artist. I was an alleyway myth, but I strutted. She may have married me out of fatigue.

When my thrusting on the stand, a dreadful thing to behold, became lawful, my fans thought me lessened. But I was good. I swallowed the horn during my feud with music. Mimi screaming like a cat in a bath but with actual talent. I had friends, and they had solid names like Jim, Whit and Alexander, and only one of them asked to borrow money. Well, two. One had designs on the Coyote, the way he grabbed her and lurched at her rear. Lucky I was middle-aged and beyond jealousy.

I have left out almost all of life that's beautiful. Its small acts of kindness. The pier crowd over there, who invite me in a little more every time I go to fish. Mimi Suarez almost eternally at ease. The small fame you can get by practicing some dumbish thing over and over. The sleepy awe of these grounds and lake and house. The evil I feel close at hand to know I am alive. The evil thereby. I must see the devil at hand. Then Christ.

Sponce Allison and Sidney Farté came across each other in the elder Farté's bait store. Food, engines, devices. Two bass boats, wrecks in progress on trailers on the west side, two gas pumps out front. The last of the black-and-white televisions over an open drink and meat locker. A fine greasy television, studded high on the wall, under which the sullen could eat a dawn-prepared heat-lamped meat in a roll swamped in mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup. Except for the bait, an excellent beer from a microbrewery in Louisiana was the only item of real quality.

The coffee was bad, the standard for parsimony and contempt at fuel stops. Even fresh, in the prelight of dawn.

Two tables. Pepper Farté charged fifty cents to sit and eat there if you did not buy grub at the store but ate your own and needed only a drink. The television was free. This bothered Pepper a little. He would rather have put blindfolds on the mere loiterers he suffered around his linoleum.

Sidney was only fifteen years younger than Pepper, his father. But he was in far worse shape. They were scions of a pusillanimous French line too lazy and ignorant to anglicize their name in a pleasant manner, and they had been laughed at plenty by squires and rootless trash both, and even blacks. In the matter of blacks, Pepper's hatred of everything was so full it left nothing over for racial distractions. He looked at all the same, his eyelids raised only a bit as if asking silently,
Why in hell were you born to trouble me?
His being eighty-eight now should have made him resent the hip-hop throbbing from the cars of the bloods out at the gas pump while they came in for a beer. But for Pepper it was only another small pestilence, like his son, seventy-three with shingles and in chemotherapy and radiation, always threatening pneumonia, sent to plague Pepper by the same Overlord who had vexed him always.

Pepper looked awful, but he was in good health except for wear and the scholar's spinal curve he had gotten behind the counter, despising the chore of making change. Many of the prices in his store were rounded to the higher figure for this reason. Change was precious and his arms were feeble, holding it, and he had to fight going higher by a dime on all his goods.