Yonder Stands Your Orphan (14 page)

Big Lloyd and Edie were on a mattress in the rear and had stopped eating each other briefly while the patrolman talked. Mortimer had been driving them and watching in the overlarge rearview mirror above the dash. For his personal entertainment.
Personal
was your operative word here.
My country 'tis of me
.

“Mr. Mortimer. Do you have farming land in Sharkey or Issaquena County?”

“Farmland? Would that be a high crime?”

“No. I just thought you might know some of my folks.”

Mortimer could not believe this fool.

“No, I don't know farm people. I'm driving on your soil, your folks' soil?”

“None of my folks talks like you.”

“Are you saying I got stopped for talking?”

“Sir. You know, you look like Conway Twitty. A good man, I hear.”

“Except he's dead, Officer, sir.”

“Yes. But they say things about the King too.”

“My aching.” The license came back to him through the little slit of window.

“The Kang. What if I called your boss?”

“The sheriff? The High Sheriff?”

“Yes, Deputy. The sheriff.”

“Well, I'd just say I had probable cause. But I'm not ticketing you this time.”

Mortimer said nothing until the deputy had driven away. “I have a life. Shoot me.”

The deputy told the sheriff privately in the office who he had stopped and why, and how sassy the man was. The sheriff seemed unimpressed. Mortimer had no record. Then the deputy described their nasty conversation.

“He didn't really miss the stop sign, did he?”

“Sort of.”

“No. You stopped him because it was a black Lexus SUV and you'd never seen the inside of one, or you thought you had a dope-hauling African-American sort of dude, or a casino entertainer. No?”

The sheriff threw himself on his knees in front of the deputy. The deputy had seen a minor version of this theater offered to others but never had he come in the way of it himself.

“God, please save me from Boy Scouts.” Facetto put his hands together in worship.

The deputy was astonished, sick with embarrassment. He worshiped this sheriff. “Sir?”

“Yes, Lord Deputy?”

“Do you know any Conway Twitty songs?”

“Your life began about the last season of the eight-track tape, Bernardo. ‘You're standing on a bridge that just won't burn'?”

“I'm what?”

“One of his tunes, Bernardo.”

“Yes sir.”

“Get rhythm, son. I beg you.”

“Aw.”

“Or just read a book.”

“Yes sir. Could you please get off your knees?”

“But I love thee, Lord Bernardo.”

“Personnel are gathered at the window.”

“Get the book, Bernard. Look up the difference between
deputy
and
rubbernecking fool
.”

The sheriff got dreamy. “I seen this movie the other night, deputy old son.”

“You don't talk like that, Sheriff.”

“No. But a priest in it knew karate against zombies. He said, ‘I'm kicking ass for the Lord.' Is that what you're doing, or is that what I'm doing?”

“You're embarrassing me, sir.”

“Now get out there and troll amongst those sullen crackers along the roads. They're used to talking to their own dicks and staring offwards, looking for cars. I implore you, Bernard. Don't just be hitting on strange cars.”

Those gathered at the window felt much more for the young deputy than they did for the sheriff. The murmurs had been going. The histrionics, the Norton, the fact he might be gay, the lack of hate, the little zeal he showed for his gun.

Hare and Sponce were not doing well. Sat on either end of the porch in ragged lounge chairs and reclined, with the radio tuned out and in on the tape box and orange Gatorade in a cold thermos next to each, brought and refilled by Dee when she was home. After three days she had had to go back to work, but she had no dates and this was sweet to them both. They did not eat. They were drawn, pale, whimpering, like things called by Legba. They expected the virus to pass each day listening to a radio song about rum and the sea. The health in the song was miserable to them.

They were some better, then not. They marveled at the disease. It had its own dreams. Big violent birds and prehistoric sauria. A man with an enormous head who searched for a hat and killed many. Hats or people. Johnny Cash in Vietnam. Neither was alive at the date of Cash's appearance for the soldiers. They fell asleep at any time and went into
somebody else's story, somebody who also seemed lost and sick. They awoke to another singing about dope, seawater and dizzy sophomores. A one-note faked happiness, rhyming names to
malaria
. Inside, the television flamed with others talking, dying. Nobody watched. They were too weak to turn a button off and weary of listening to the bubbles of their own selves. They hung as in caves for lost days, aged hermits at twenty, twenty-one. To the bathroom if anywhere. Wet feet on tile.

Isaac and Jacob came out of a culvert they could almost stand in and walked into the yard. The grass was thick and good in large parts of the yard. Zoysia. Sponce saw them and imagined the culvert ran back miles into the woods. The boys wore clean tank tops, coral and blue. Sponce thought they had been in the culvert for hours, maybe days. He wondered vaguely why Isaac's shoulder was bandaged. If it was the monster from his dream they had been fighting.

One of them went up to the radio and tuned out the fuzz.

“Where you been?”

“What's wrong with you?”

“We been sick, Isaac. You don't wanna know.”

“Where's Mama?”

“At work. She about to quit. Some old lady is asking her sexual advice. They think Mama smashed up some animal glasses or like. They think our mother did that.”

“How can she quit?” Isaac said.

“She's got Daddy and them men supportin' her.”

“She needs taking care of anyway,” Hare put in. “Her health is important.”

“Her job's the part of her isn't nobody else's,” said Jacob. “She can't quit.”

“You want more money for her staying on?” asked Hare.

“I never thought the least about money.”

“She heard what you been up to. Hare lied and told her all y'all had was dummy zombies. Where are they?” Sponce demanded.

“Sitting in their own peace.”

“You a wart.”

“None of that's the point,” Hare said. “The point is you were somewheres like two stray dogs. Off. Else I dreamt it.”

“You get well and fix up that car, Hare. Or we might go to the sheriff and stand back and wait for the reward. That was a car like songs are written about, and we goin' to have it in red and a gold hood. Or else I'm gonna tell Mama alls you want is your weenie in her.”

“Mama doesn't need that anymore,” Sponce snapped. “You shut off your pie hole, wart.”

“Here's a story,” said Jacob the skinnier, taller. “These people is our ticket unless that car gets done. It might be some old rich man in Missouri missin' his wife and child all this time. He'd be laying on his deathbed cryin', and all this money and it never been no happiness since they were stolen. He misses the car too. Then you see us on television and him light up. And we would be friends, we wouldn't need no daddy or dating men ever again. He wouldn't let none of us six need nothing again, aside from the reward. We'd have a new house on a brand-new lake. If not a ocean.”

Hare turned even sicker. If that were possible, heaving a new tomb in a dry rock face from his bowels.

But he spoke in a whisper afterward.

“I'm going through some purification here. I got to have it. Them old stories hit at me. I'm all reamed out of
everything nasty. I'm not listening to any more nasty stories. That ain't right. We all better get us a better story. When I'm well, it's going to be a good story.”

The next morning Hare awoke on the recliner on the porch in his pajamas. July was well on. The house was too big for its window air-conditioning units. Some corners sweltered, eighty-eight at night. He snapped his mouth to cut off a snore and slept. He had on no shirt. His lean muscles were packed closely.

Dee saw him when she went off to Onward in her whites. Her knees went a little weak.
When will I get any better about men
, she asked herself. She walked in a trance most of the day. Cautious, polite, gone milky and holy in the head, abstracted into kindness.

MORTIMER PICKED UP THE MAGAZINE. HE COULD NOT
quite believe it existed, the gift of an old girlfriend who had found it on the Internet.
New Deal
, the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns. Good-looking women and whole families in chairs on brick and concrete lawns. Homes in bare sand neither in the desert nor near the ocean. Not a sunset in the magazine. No visible seasons. The only length of prose was an article about Hitler's bunker in the last days of Berlin, not for the history but for the architecture.

Some dwellings were high-fashioned storm cellars. To hold off grass, leaves and the elements. Nearing airlessness even in the photograph.

Mortimer was loaded with himself. He had dreamed his history, and in this heavy automobile, in heavy calm, he was a creature of great velocity. He had forgotten to tell her what to wear, and this annoyed him. He went in the casino with her full of self-worth and clarity. It had been awhile and he was mysterious. She was intrigued. Then they walked across the lot and entered the hotel, a huge monster waiting for them.

He wondered why he was not three countries away, but not long. Edie and Large Lloyd were waiting in the penthouse suite. They drank drinks. The wallpaper was flocked with red kudzu and catfish forms swimming in it, gold traces. Somehow not trashy.

She told him in the elevator what a suck-up the sheriff was, coming around Almost There. He liked hearing that.

“Are you attracted to him?”

“I believe it's the other way around.”

She thought she could hear the din of gamblers, glasses rattling, shouts expressed from a gilded maw somewhere. Impossible at this distance. The very air perhaps.

Large Lloyd and Edie waited in the room, wore sunglasses.

“Let me make an introduction.”

A show about sharks and rays was on a large television. Dee had not watched television since nature began to play such a part. The sharks weren't bad, although Mortimer seemed frightened of them and presumed she would be. He looked without wanting to and could not even manage to get pensive before looking away.

On the big vanity dresser, his collection of knives stood in their case. Huge machetes to slivery stilettos, even razor knives. Velvet backing two inches thick, scarlet. Gold and silver instruments of despair against people in the golden excess of the room. They all simply stared at the collection.

“Here it is. I've shown you the houses over in Belhaven and Jackson, those English cottages and lawns. You didn't want that. I'm going to play you some more nothing for two hours, and you can't turn it off or I will come back and you won't like it. It is a rehearsal of a man named Raymond on a saxophone, from a band called Caliente something. His wife, the Coyote, sings, and she's good. But you see what you think about him. Then you decide between me and Frank Booth, who won't be looking very good soon.”

Lloyd the Huge spoke. “My actual name is Lloyd. You will remember this night and my name. Large Lloyd.”

“And my name is Edie,” said the woman in the elegant dress, the ballroom heels. “I go deep.”

When Dee had listened to the dreadful saxophone, the endlessness of its despair and whining, then gaseous punctuations, she turned off the tape deck but kept watching the television for the sharks and rays. She was certain then that Man Mortimer was a disease and had assumed she knew this too for a while. He did make things happen, but the flow of these things had been redundant until now. He was only a man, even with this interesting disease. The others came in immediately.

Dee was not that averse. She had finished many men and loved to reduce them. The woman, when she began with her endearments, was not nightmarish or painful. Dee, who had never had a woman before, was thrilled by naughtiness more wanton and liquid than any since the first naked night of adolescence. An actual departure, as distinct as first leaving the Garden of Eden and perhaps the heavy air of earth altogether.

Lloyd, a mathematician and animal lover, was not accomplished, and they brought him to sighing infanthood quickly. But Man Mortimer was watching, fully clothed, and near the end of something. He rushed in and cut Dee's thigh.

Edie shouted out, “Oh God, no!”

Lloyd remonstrated but held Dee. Until then she had been winning and asserting her pleasure on others. She felt the long cut on her thigh. It stung and then throbbed. Mortimer left the room. Perhaps never to return to her in friendly form again.

The three remaining were embarrassed and sad. The woman had expected just to slap her a little and Lloyd to insist on familiar desecrations passing for ecstasy in pornographic circles. They brought her a wet towel and then
played poker with her while swallowing pills. She swallowed them too. She knew she had been sliced long and deep by a razor of some kind. Her own blood, in this prison, was a relief to see, curiously. Because that had to end it, she could still win.

She believed she had wrecked them all and they were burning now. She had reduced Mortimer to spite and outright crime. She could look him in the face, but she doubted he could look back at her. She guessed she knew him fairly well. But she drank too much and took narcotics with Edie and Lloyd, the towel bunched around her thigh. They tried to play cards but were numbed in giggles. Dee did not understand what trouble she was in until she called Edie a name and Edie hit her very hard in the mouth. Then Lloyd twisted Dee's arm out of its socket. They were gone and she was in the elevator riding up and down when she woke up. A fifty-dollar bill was pinned to the front of her dress.