Yonder Stands Your Orphan (34 page)

“I think I might be dying,” whispered Ulrich. As fatigue and repetition prepare men for death until they seek it, Ulrich felt a final tiredness. No pressing on, no other place. He sat down and all of his failures went past in a brief caravan beyond him.

The woman rested with him on a stump where he sat with his oxygen bottle. He thought of the dogs again. He thought he heard them whimpering not far off.

“You decide,” she suggested. “Either go ahead or stay behind for others. My grandmother in Cuba, and still there, told me this once when I was a little girl with an awful disease, a high fever. Only a few pictures in my young head, and them already mixed with dreams of my future in the U.S.A. I didn't know what they were, but here I am having them. The fever left, here I am.”

They both smelled something very sweet and bad, and they heard the dogs running and whining below an old
pecan farm, which had once had a mansion to go with it. Fever and then the Depression finished it off. The pecans themselves were enormous. Up to the grove was beige wheat. They saw the dogs now, and Ulrich pulled himself up with Mimi's help, grasped his bottle. Got a bigger blast into his lungs. They made their way.

This was where they found the little girl's T-shirt, cut to shreds, thrown over human dung, lying on an anthill a foot high. Ants were all over it. The dogs were circling and very concerned, but they had not torn the shirt. They were circling, and it was plain they were in the deepest grief over the child's shirt.

It is this place where Ulrich died.

Little Irma.

Who had recently, during her flight, talked to the boys on Harvard's lawn. She knew she was pursued by Malcolm, but he was crippled and she did not think he would kill her once he caught her. She was starved, skinny and alone. Malcolm would not let her have her own suicide like Bertha's. She was on the way to becoming Bertha, she had come to the orphans' camp with suicidal urges, which she had acted on twice in Indianapolis when she had living parents.

She stumbled upon the Allison boys in Harvard's driveway busting up a long-dead pecan limb for the simple reason that it was whole. She did not know where she was, but the house was so wide and nice, with its pine-needled lawn, that she thought it might be a church or a fort, and she dreamed of it as if it were in a book right before her. She had had friends who lived in such homes, but it seemed two eras ago. She was playing Ping-Pong in a garage of one in Indianapolis and an old man came out of the house and said, “I see it now, child. You will become a medical missionary
somewhere and be a great woman.” He was the grandfather of the house, and she took him for mad and giggled along with her playmate, but now it seemed a deep saying and a future waiting on her, if she could walk out of here now, away from Malcolm, who claimed to love her, him an old hairy man.

He loved Irma, but it was Mimi Suarez he wanted and her husband he wanted to exterminate. He was lost in waves of passion. Driving him down a gray wall. Like those motorcyclists in the velodromes at the state fair.

The boys looked like they belonged here, and she was encouraged, even in her weakness. They were her age, native to this boondockery. The pines, the briars. She felt like a ruined hibiscus, the most exotic plant she knew. Stomped, gums bleeding, perhaps white around the mouth.

“You an orphan?” Jacob asked her.

“Yeah, I'm an orphan, a real orphan, on the move. Nobody stops me,” Irma said. She almost fainted but smiled.

“Are they after you?”

“One man. I think I'm on my way to being a medical missionary.”

“You real skinny and pale. We'll get you a cola.”

“All right.”

Jacob went off to the house and Harvard came out on the porch, but it was not clear he could make her out at this distance. A big old smooth yard.

She sat on the lawn in a sweaty Big Mart T-shirt with a little cartoon girl and an enormous flower on it. This cartoon girl had big eyes.
I will work with tiny orphans like her on my shirt,
thought Irma.
There's so much I could tell her.
Jacob returned with a cold wet towel and she pressed it to her face and arms, then stomach. They watched her belly button with no apology. It was pretty, a deep tunneled shadow. She also
had the buds of breasts in the cartoon shirt. It unsettled the boys, the idea of her, their age. They weren't ready to be like her. In fact, they were closer to infants.

“You couldn't live here like us, but you could stay and play with the boats Doc Harvard made us for a while till they came got you. Eat some popcorn and get ice from the machine on the refrigerator,” said Jacob.

“No. I have to walk on.” She was in a dream and taking care of foreign children in it.

When she walked away, she had only enough energy to last for the mission. She believed health would rise in her as it had many times before.
I could begin with those boys. I will tell them about Jesus and Mary. How they are better than parents.

Irma suddenly heard something after a mile in the woods. She wondered if there were great apes left in these thick woods, with its little alleys of sawgrass. Then she knew it was Malcolm thrashing toward her. A thing fighting its own sweat, tall pink stumbling, hair streaming.

Irma knew he was coming from her dream mission in the foreign lands. She said to the thing, “Go ahead and eat me.”

“You notice anything new about me?” asked Malcolm.

She took off.

“You ran and made me mad, now,” panted Malcolm, covered in burrs and scratches. “You ain't got nothing but me now. You want to see my new moves.” She ran as he was beset by an attack of diarrhea over an ant mound.

Mortimer, all he did was look. Betsy had a book about Conway Twitty. This man had changed his name from something like Vernon to Conway Twitty, from the names of two ugly towns in Arkansas and Texas. Or because he had a sense
of humor, but by his eyes she did not think so, if photographs told the truth. He was a family man, upright, embarrassed by lewdness or even rumor, although he was sexy with his tunes, the writer wrote. Mortimer sat across the room watching the gigantic Japanese television while Betsy read. She tried to find Twitty in his bone structure.

She did not think of this, but it was a strictly adolescent house they occupied, nothing but a few sticks of furniture and thick throw rugs and the giant-screen television, sloppy at the base with mixed videos. Not a plant or even salt. Loaded with snacks and sodas. Otherwise a clean kitchen, no odor except the smell of manufacture.

“I will tell your mother and father what you do with me,” she said once.

“You're not even going to see them. Don't be an idiot. You're not here against your will.”

“Some of it. I'm thirteen.”

“Get back in the book. Nobody's hurt you.”

“You and me, old man, are orphans from normal. Remember? But I can change.”

“Stay quiet and you can be anything you want.”

“We'll see.”

A curious pause on the front porch of the bait store. Mortimer's yellow Lexus parked, no others. Dark clouds but not a speck of rain, only this deep shadow. Raymond and Roman could see Mortimer and Sidney at the counter inside peering into a glass-lidded case full of knives on velvet. They seemed at church. Not yet touching these treasures.

See this little man, the high wavy bush of hair, the thin ankles in tasseled and buckled moccasins that seemed trimmed with actual coral snakeskin. Raymond and Roman had meant to buy supplies for crappie fishing on Harvard's
launch, then have some talk of cancer, music, the history of Roman's Indian tribe, Jesus Christ as a man of the whip, taking time to make it right there in the temple. Raymond had not known a black man since the days of southern apartheid, although he called their names.

The fifties. In Raymond's small town, there was a tiny college campus on which the faculty and students lived in three-storied Edwardian brick houses. The snow and then vicious ice had been on three days, a storm of the century for where they lived, in southern Mississippi near the capital city. A professor's house caught fire. He was a veteran and had brought back live German rounds and weaponry in glass cases. It was not clear whether he just taught Nazis or taught them because he loved them, their flags, their helmets. Much of this ambiguity in the early fifties.

The water pipes were frozen. Nothing to do but throw snowballs into the fire engulfing the professor's house. Then they saw the glass cases, and the bullets began exploding. Two men were scraped, the crowd widened. A hopeless single fire truck, officious yokels wringing their hands but having fun too. Germany rearing up on three stories and blowing its flak around. Raymond had no better memory. That evening of the fire and the booms and the thrilled citizens, a bullet of the Reich could touch anybody. The professor might be in there, on fire and lecturing.

What I am,
thought Max Raymond suddenly,
is an overprepared man. Here I am back at the burning place, where I keep returning ever since I was eleven. Shiloh. Where man meets God, but the man has come too early and wearing the wrong things. I have suffered.
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

Raymond stood ashamed before Mortimer. A bootlicker to a phantom.

John Roman was also humiliated to meet his attacker. Getting shot was nothing like this. This little man had his number.

“Hello, Man,” Roman said, surprising himself. He and Raymond watched Mortimer climbing down from the stool. A head with his wig, exempted from blame, by a shape totally shifted into sickness. He might as well be a little girl, almost unbalanced by his large hair. Maybe he didn't remember Roman.

Raymond and Roman moved off as Mortimer and Sidney laid hands on the glass. Eloquent hilts. Arcs and stilettos, a near sickle, smaller but heavy in the blade like a bolo. A sickness sat in the room, which they each seemed to have agreed not to discuss. Their faces blank, the men acted as though they had never met.

Mortimer said something had to be done, these evil children were all over the place. Uptown, other towns. Some had been making nude movies, was the rumor. Nobody had much shame left. Mortimer smiled ear to ear.

“I picked you up this tonic. Brings up the immune system, said the old boy at the herb store. I'm feeling better for it myself. Feistier. Heart's back in my projects,” Man said.

“You ain't looking it. You poorly.”

“We ain't old yet.”

“I am, and sick as a dog,” Sidney lied. He awoke nowadays with a fine mean on.

But Sidney knew sickness. The way you could sink inside yourself and worship it. Shock them by your dilapidation yet refuse to fall.

Mortimer's people had changed too. They were not as stupid as he thought. They had their own righteousness. They
were no longer amazed by the excesses of his career. The SUVs, the strange empty homes, the small film production concern in Clinton. He knew they expected sin close to him. When he left for business, he saw pain in their looks.

His old man was interested most in the junkyard, where he played quarter poker with Peden. His man Peden, in the shotgun house, whom Mortimer was allowing to live unmaimed. Peden and Mr. Mortimer played cards and talked fifties automobiles.

Mortimer tried to find his mother a hobby, but her eyesight was not good and she preferred silence. It bathed her, she said. She loved telling clean, pointless stories in which her struggles were the only memorable thing. Changing a tire on her own and finding a neighborhood dog nestled in with a family of coyotes. The old woman had insight too. When he brought little Irma past his folks at his SUV agency and told them she was the granddaughter of a client, Mrs. Mortimer's face went red.

Still, she said they loved him and owed him for being stupid about his needs in Missouri. She agreed how a chicken yard in back could humiliate a boy who needed cars and girlfriends. How they went to church too much, expecting the pastor to correct all troubles straight from the pulpit, and how some of these pastors were fools who had barely entered life before they began announcing on it. She hugged Mortimer over and over now, commenting on his new white hair.

He felt something for her and his father. It was intense, this feeling, a fresh one for him. Made him nervous and awkward around them. He gave aid needlessly, as out of a tube of charity inside his heart. He sat with them, saying nothing, three porch-bound elders watching for cars at the four-way stop.

At the house Mortimer finally had finished for them in Rolling Fork, they sat for three hours without a peep. Mortimer's new shoes the only true expression hereabouts. Penny loafers, black, the leather stamped with leaping trout.

The house was plush leather furniture, gold and bright copper hardware set next to black for kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Stinking of fiberglass and new wool on the floors.

After the silence, while he was leaving, he said, “I'm happy we got all that cleared up.”

They laughed their first laugh together.

Mortimer drove to Big Mart to buy his mother flowers for her sitting room where she actually sat as if friends might arrive any second. He pulled up behind a man loading topsoil. Mortimer thought he recognized him, Bertha's nephew Ronny, whose body shop he had used. The man did not know who Mortimer was, now in a Rolls Land Rover stolen in San Francisco. The man kept loading the topsoil in front of Mortimer's windshield, with his car door out in the passing lane. Mortimer could not move, yet he was practicing patience, thought, depth. Then he put his face out the window and asked, “Would you shut the door so I can get by, please?”

A look of disgust crossed the man's face. Mortimer reached to his ashtray, put on his new ring. He had lately been interested in the concept of
irony
. How on the face of others it meant insult, such as Pepper had shown him before his beheading. The man had figured Mortimer to be a small irrelevance. This man closed the car door with that irony on his face. He was, after all, a busy foreman at the body shop now. Who was this skinny sissy with big hair in his tank of a car? Mortimer saw all this. Then stopped his car in front of the man's. “Excuse me, sir. Would that be a look of
irony
on your face? Would you be giving me irony right now?”