Yonder Stands Your Orphan (29 page)

“Sure we are. Now I'm through talking. Go ahead.”

“We are needing testimony against Man Mortimer,” said Facetto.

“This sounds like you on television. The new breed of high sheriff,” taunted Peden. “What the hell is new about Mortimer?”

The sheriff was angry, red.

“You've gotten plenty of airtime, sir,” Harvard broke in. “Much expatiation on criminology. Little actual arresting of it. There is not much you
have
done except,” Harvard swept his hand toward Melanie, “dally with a woman twice your age.”

“I am older than that. We are in love,” said Melanie.

“In heat,” spat Harvard. “I think Facetto should abdicate for the woman he loves. Or whatever negligent sheriffs do. Man, you can't serve.”

Facetto was mad. He had been taunted by mail, the telephone, distant shouts, and now by this considerable old surgeon whose intelligence he could not deny.

“You've got an orphans' militia over there,” said Lewis. “Somebody's going to be hurt.”

“I've spoken to them,” Facetto said. Many folks stood up and milled, just absorbing him. Nobody else was listening. They were talking on their own and leaving. He was very sorry he had come. There was no face to maintain here, no walk to walk. He felt himself melting and near tears. His gun hand trembled. He was beginning to join the hate for himself. Melanie saw all this. She could not rush to him, and in fact she despised him a little herself.

“You can't gang up and destroy this man. He's a good man. He works hard,” Melanie was saying. This too was ignored, drowned out, mocked. They themselves left and Peden was alone.

Peden, with a coffee, fresh and hot French roast from his loyal Big Mart maker, was in agreeable shape finally. The last of the kicks of the lush, peaceful even during the last wedding. No longer threaded out and driven forward, he sat and reviewed the life he lived in the junkyard, and he found it good. These stacks and caverns of heavy metal around him. They had a quietness. A solid face. It was something, he was something that made it signify. He had the Lord, he had his time. Who suspected any would haul in this rotted rust and take the better version of the same '48 with them? Peden still hoped he would get over it, and that his old debt would be forgiven.

The debt was this. Peden had once gone in to Mortimer while very drunk and asked him for $13,000 to buy a new Harley Davidson Softtail. Everything depended on it, Peden thought, for his own esteem. His soul was already in the bike. It was only a matter of what he would do to get it. He had a woman named Bertha at that time, from up at Redwood. She had satellite television and they had a good time, she mainly sober. Bertha fell off his new machine on a
curve out of Panther Burn on Highway 14. She had no medical plan, only Peden. Peden borrowed more, and Bertha began working for Mortimer at the car place in Vicksburg. SUV demos. Good deals. Now Peden was in big hock, and the interest was berserk, but he and Mortimer kept smiling, and Bertha's back and leg were okay.

Peden lit a Lucky, sat and stretched in front of the potbelly woodstove. Very nice to be out of the rain, very comfortable here. Didn't need the television on, even if it was a good big fat Phillips like Bertha's. He thought of Byron Egan, what a constant pal he was. How all was right when Egan cheered him. Peden had had another pal who died, Debord. Debord had simply gotten lung cancer and died, but Peden was certain his friend rode next to him still. Whenever he thought of Debord, and then Egan, he became spiritual. Perhaps he should not even read the newspaper, to keep it that way. The trio was all they needed. One happened to be gone and needing no coffee anymore. But riding with them, his white hair behind him like fleece in a legend.

Just then a man came in the window with a club, clambering over the windowsill from the shotgun porch. Peden couldn't believe it was Mortimer or that he was coming straight at him this way. Later he thought Mortimer expected he'd be watching television when he came in. The club was big, with wire around it. Peden didn't recognize it until Mortimer had limped away, with little effeminate screams. Mortimer hit him once on the shoulder, then Peden was all over him, picking up chairs and an old wooden Coke case. He thrashed on Mortimer very well, over and over. Saw he was going for the hip, where there was a knife, he well knew. Peden beat and beat on Mortimer until the man could take no more, found the door and dragged away. Without even a threat.

For a good long while, Peden rubbed his shoulder and thought about a trip to the hospital. Then he decided on it but grew cold when he thought of Mortimer. He doubted the man could stand and feared rooming with him in the emergency ward. This was not a problem. Mortimer was not in the building.

PEDEN WAS A STRONG MAN. HE WAS MUSCULAR IN
total despite the years of hard living. His shoulder was bruised black but healed quickly.

Mortimer did not heal much at all. But he didn't languish long. He hurt in every pore, every tissue. Even his lips had been hit. He was not angry at Peden. He would kill him, he was quite sure, and perhaps with his own hands. But he could not blame him. He hated his attitude, hopeful in his stupid mistakes, the '48 and now fighting back. When he called up Peden, he told him to destroy the ruined '48, take it to bits, every cell. His voice was even, and Peden wondered if the fight had proved something.

Mortimer himself wondered whether he would have to use a gun, for which he had no affection. He hoped not, but things would be coming up. His tongue was getting more tied, he could not explain and mollify as he used to do. The wedding.
On my own property, Dee, and with a medium-size mechanic, a fool
.

Frank Booth, too, chilled him with his bald head and Twitty face. What tribute was this? Or was the man deranged and unaware of what he had become? Bald Conway Twitty, if he had lived longer. Booth's appearance was a bad thing of the shadows, and Mortimer was horrified he would come near with some other weapon.

Maybe he should call the sheriff. Mortimer smiled. Unbalance the man still more. He would say it was out of his jurisdiction, but Mortimer would keep after him. He
dialed. He loved the whining answer, the trembling he heard, the remonstrations.

“Oh, it's special all right,” Mortimer said. “Man mocking me like this. Got a whole new face to do it.”

“Why did he need a new face?”

“Don't you even read the papers, man?”

“I read a lot of papers. You don't want to forget who you're talking to, sir. I don't have to stand for this.”

“Yes, I'm sorry. Getting out of hand over here. It's just spooky. Thought you could speak to him.”

“What would I say to the man about his chosen face?”

“Most of us don't have that option. I see your point.”

“You don't just go up to a fellow and say, ‘Fellow, I don't like your face.'”

“You don't? Well I do, all the time. Too much, I guess. Thanks for your time, anyway.”

“Who is this again? Mort Durr?”

“Yes sir, Commander Facetto.”

“They don't call me
commander
. Sheriff is fine.”

“I'm sure it is. Bye now.”

He had a vision of piling all his SUVs together some afternoon and burning them while the sheriff's department and other fools looked on.

Mortimer knew Sidney was his man when he wanted him, and he was able enough to drive to the bait store on a Thursday when he could also hold down some soft black-eyed peas and corn bread at the bad restaurant. Sidney's lackey Opal was minding the store, but this girl told him Sidney was down to the new boat in Farté Cove. When he drove by, he saw Sidney amid a great mix of men and advisers nearly working on the boat. It was another barge going up, all right, and now Mortimer wanted it, to sail it and make it smell good
and have something for his whores. He would be well known on the lake and finally a pride of the region when he became an elder, because you were colorful then and people liked to see you prosper. Get nostalgic about when times were colorful and wilder and better. Let go because of history and what you'd done for it. A picture of him shaking hands with the law. A giant three-deck riverboat with paddle wheel in the background. Rest Home of Old Whores and Fishing. This joke hurt his liver when he laughed.

Still, he liked Dr. Harvard and the suddenly plentiful crowd. He didn't know a third of them, must be twelve, fifteen down there. Sidney was off the deck but the center somewhere at the end of the pier, jawing. The boat would be his in the future.
I made Sidney famous,
thought Mortimer.

They heard the big stuff over at the camp on a Saturday afternoon. It was dynamite. The Ten Hoors had decided to make an island out of their camp, and nobody could stop them after they got the explosives permit, which was fairly easy. You can blow up your own place if you've room for it. Harvard, Lewis and Wren, working on the barge, with Roman and Raymond lifting heavy pieces for them, and Sidney looking on, heard the
whumps
.

They were blowing canals. They had hired this company, but the leader of the gang was a man who lived to change the earth. He was seventy and loved his job. He had not gotten enough of this in Korea with the marines, blowing away bridges and roads in the famous retreat from Chosin Reservoir that cost the communists one million dead. But this man had not veered, he was happier then than he had ever been, except for right now.
Imagine making an island out of your place suddenly,
he said.
Imagine. Right here at home.
It was going to take a lot of bomb here. Across the
lake the men and Melanie and Bernice could see the sky get humps of black along its horizon line. Perhaps whole trees and their dust. Sidney hoped for an enormous accident if this was not one already. Limbs and ash and bone-spray in the air. A real shame.

Ruthna, Harb, Alexander and Whit arrived that afternoon. They had decided they could no longer abide the suburbs, especially since they could not make the house payments. They were something on the order of a middle-age commune and quickly agreed that nature and the lake were just the thing. It was changing them even as they hauled in their luggage, in fact. They had rented a modern, beamed ski-lodge affair, which gave the tourist the rare sense of having fallen off an alp into a steaming bog. They were near the Roosevelt lodge where Ulrich and Egan lived. When the dynamiting started, they were horrified. Their tall white sycamores trembled. They were hungover and in hell. Ruthna fell flat on the ground. Whit held his ears while his luggage scattered.

“He is always talking about his mother and father and Christ,” said Mimi once the scare had passed. Ruthna was becoming her confidante.

“Then he will be tired of talking, Mimi. All theological discussion will become shameful comedy. He has said people are snakes who love talking late at night about God. They don't know God, but they surround themselves with other pretenders. These are direct quotes, I think,” said Ruthna, who knew Raymond too well.

“But what does Raymond have for acts? He has his saxophone, he doesn't even have much money left. He has the friendship of punks and old men.”

“And you. Maybe he will do something for the orphans, like his mother did. He can't forget her.”

“He tries, he speaks of his deaf absent father all the time, the gunner in the war against Japan. I think he was jealous of the orphans,” said Mimi.

“I've got to go. We'll try to be sober next time we see you. Things have fallen apart and we've fallen here.”

“You're at the right place, Ruthna. I don't know anybody much who's not decomposing. Even Max says people are hardly necessary anymore, and they have no acts. They tend to float away. It's frightening.”

“If the Son of God has not visited us, Mimi, who are we? Am I just a lush and actress and tramp?”

“Well, he always said at least you were something, as long as you could stand it. I want to worship something bigger than me or I'm lost. It must be the music, but not always. Not at three in the afternoon. Only an idiot sings always.”

“My acts are all bad, Mimi. What about that? I have no imagination for a good act. Am I dead? I guess I'm normally courteous. So are the dead.”

“Max wants to see a chariot of fire or light one himself.”

“These poets keep wanting to suck the water out of the ocean with a straw.”

The boys were all driven out. It was hard to hide a car painted like this. But they did not want to see their new stepfather. They had seen their father for the first time since they were six and seven and wished he'd stayed longer. Though to them, Canada was just one of many places farther away than Sharkey County. He never heard about the car, and they knew nobody was in favor of small boys owning and driving such a machine. They imagined ogres of many types lost just behind them in their smoke, but nobody had gotten close. High speed over the gravel at the penultimate velocity, over rocks like low
shoals of water. The amateurs are dead behind you. This is how the boys felt, and they had gone back to Benson & Hedges, long ones. They were also hidden in the last dry purchase of the swamp behind Raymond and Mimi's house.

They waited until evening to announce themselves. Looking for Mimi's titties through the window seemed beneath them now. They loved her singing too much. They sought her now because they were much growner. They had traded their mother for a car, and Harold was all the father they had left.

Lately Harold was picking up wheel rims and flexing with sledgehammers for his strength regimen. He ate two steaks and salads at a time, his acne went away, and he had found chemicals in the Big Mart pharmacy that cut and bulked you out. These were expensive, but the boys saw he did have a better body.

They did not take pity on their mother's private needs. Nor were they aware that she liked Harold in the least, which she did. He had even begun higher mechanics at the trade school. He brought down the swearing in the house. He threatened to play games with the boys. He was not proud of providing these children with such a garish rocket. His breakneck labor, his theft, which still had to be paid for. He cringed now when he thought he could get away with the switch. One
was
a car, the other a hulk of gummy decay.