Yonder Stands Your Orphan (35 page)

“Tire iron, you say? No, I don't lend out.”

At this Mortimer's right hand flew up and a ring-mounted razor swiped across the man's chin and lip so there was an awful amount of blood. The man squalled through a dark mustache of it dripping over his hands, at his chin, his jowls. “It's the rudeness, man. Everywhere. And you worked for me, forgot me, let your real self loose on me out here.”

The man recognized him then. He was astounded by his thinness and wild high hair. Puny Italian sandals and no suitable beach sand for hundreds of miles.

Ronny watched for Mortimer's return and other strokes. Waited on the story of Mortimer's fury. He could not believe his own lips bore the tale, pouring down his shirtfront. He did not know why it had angered the man to find him ungiving about the tire iron.

Mortimer walked in on Peden and his father. They were paging through Peden's file box of calendar art. Motorcycles or cars with women. Lazing across a car hood, handlebars, a fender. On one a man's great tongue against thighs, scrawled there by a jokester. Worship of moving parts, combustion, bodies these two could covet. More than a spaceship or a moon landing, this local steel mesmerized them. No destination but the thing itself.

They barely recognized Mortimer.

“I need meth to tide me over. To end the blues and the nasty world out there. You know how it is, getting well,” he began straight off.

“You at the wrong place. No meth for three years,” Peden told Mortimer. He looked at Mr. Mortimer's face. “Even when I sold, you wouldn't find me at home doing it.”

“Pawn guy said you holding.”

“That man is dead, the holding man,” said Peden.

“Peden is now a Christian minister. He won't even touch a beer,” said Mr. Mortimer.

“Man, you got to help me past this day. I might kill myself.
Myself
.”

“Which pawnbroker?”

“The guy, man. Tattoos. Civil War sabers, metal detectors.”

“Who are you?” asked Peden.

“C'mon. You know me.”

“No I don't,” said Peden.

“Everybody knows me.”

“So?”

“I exist, man.”

Mr. Mortimer gathered himself to Peden's side. “You could be a demon to be dealt with by the Lord.”

“He would know me. He would.”

“But I don't. You'll have to forgive me.”

“I don't.”

“I believe I killed somebody but it was in another country.”

“God help you, you haven't gone anywhere,” said Peden.

“I exist, man,” said Mortimer.

“I took you for somebody you're nothing like. Now I can't remember
that
person. You're the demon itself. I've seen them before and you too,” said Peden.

Peden looked at Mr. Mortimer, the father, who had made a noise. He was actually squirming, lost in humiliation. It had been thirty years since he had reckoned on the fact his son might be an absence, or all things present at once. Against the chickens in the back window, he had watched the profile of the boy and comprehended him as a dangerous
nullity, although he could not have voiced this. He knew only that he had been frightened and should be dying of shame.

Egan approached the orphans' camp slowly. He had the dogs in the car. Ulrich's death had nearly broken him, and he thought what he would find at the camp might do the rest of the job. The camp was strangely silent and marks of destruction were everywhere. Two dead orphans were floating near the bridge to the northern entrance, shot at close range in the head.

Trembling Egan left the dogs in the car and crossed the bridge. Exploring the grounds, he saw no one, though he thought some orphans might be hiding in one of the buildings. Finally old Pete Wren waved to him and came out of the assembly hall. He was living at the camp lately as a counselor emeritus, had worn a bathrobe during the whole catastrophe. He told Egan everything had started because of some new arrivals: two big black inmates from Norfolk, Virginia, and Paterson, New Jersey, and a white boy from South Mississippi who had made himself an orphan, who had killed his own father after watching his mother die of alcoholism, but was exonerated. Wren seemed curiously calm but wouldn't stop the irrelevancies, Egan thought.

“I came over because I was inspired by the church services held by you and Peden that woke up a thing in me, to act, to do some good in my old age, because I stole my cousin's good name. It felt good to drive here and be taken right in. I slept the best sleeps I had slept in years on my hard simple cot.

“There weren't many rules. Before long, I began to find out there might not be
any
rules. Gene or Penny were always talking about love and trust at the center of the universe
and how vigilant we should be against the Old World, as they called it, but the children didn't seem to listen. They also seemed to have sex a lot, and about where they wanted it, fairly loudly and known to the children, and I could not, for the life of me, decide the lesson in this because it did not appear purely natural man-and-wife devotion but a sort of scheduled thing like a cup of coffee. They said they had been instructed by the Ultimate Pain of the bad life they'd had before now.

“Then the orphans gathered and all moved into the main building one night. They said they weren't Oasis anymore. They were Ataxes, which spelled attack and from an axis of high consciousness about children or something like that. A new bad spirit was into them, little and big, led by those black boys and the boy who'd killed his father. Somebody took a random shot at Gene and Penny trying to start a sing-along. I thought the shot was a firecracker at first. The big boys said they had learned things about who was the enemy and they were getting down serious to it. Everybody on the other side of the lake was bad. They had been using the girls and enslaving them, then turning them away when they were hurt and no good to them anymore. Gene and Penny had to know about this and didn't tell them.

“One of the black boys, the one from Paterson, put a pistol right in Malcolm's face and kept it there. The smaller rough boy told him to sit in the chair. True, I have had my lifetime of trouble with black boys and men. They were rude, sassy, out-of-the-way tricky when a straight yes or no would do. Had all the tricks especially for old white men because I guess they want up on the old colonel of the plantation. Rheumy-eyed, can't take care of himself, looking for somebody to open the door for him. But a cigarette, is that too much to ask when they have a box in their pocket? Then
you say you don't have a light, and they push out a dead lighter to you so you're lighting your cigarette but it's dead. These guys are rigged for whites like that when they're fifteen. Do they learn this at the knee of somebody, or at church, or special power groups? They'll go to prison and they come out with more cigarette tricks and are losing the war every day. Minister Farrakhan, can't he do something? They need love even with old bigots like me.”

“Wren, you old fool, shut up,” Egan said. “What happened here?”

“I'm saying it was them and Leopold, the white boy who killed his father. He was a Mississippi Irish criminal. You'll see a strain of that pop out in the best families who've been mild and rich for three generations. Then the guns come, the screams, murder and suicide. Anyway, Leopold was quiet but in command because he had the blood on him. What most in the world he hated was adults messing with children. He was some rough animal who had been passing for mild. You'd think only an inner city could breed that coldness and that easy killing. No manners, a hiss for a voice, and big dead eyes greener than green. Became his daddy's monster, a stroke of revenge, no mercy. He and the black boys twinned up in some awful memories together. They would say the war was coming, and in a war there was no guilt. Nobody would ever find out who did what in a war. You had freedom to kill and hurt your slave masters. Nobody looked at me, and I'm glad they didn't.

“They kept Gene and Penny on the movie stage and accused them of being depraved. Penny began weeping, then told how much they had sacrificed, her and Gene. ‘You are the child we lost, come back to us in many souls.

“‘You done tore each other up getting your piece, which is slobbering on each other in front of children,' said
the white father-killer. Then they nailed Gene and Penny in their room and began starving them.

“Then the three boys walked up on poor Malcolm. They hanged him on a tree right in the horse yard, but they were sloppy and Malcolm pulled up and hung on the limb before he choked. But hanging there was bad enough. They let him crawl down and live like it was what they meant. But he better never make a whimper. And he wouldn't.”

“What were you doing while all this was going on?” Egan asked.

“I would say I was a mascot, too old for them to blame for anything. All I can brag to is I was around, in a corner or under a stage or in the projector room or the broom closet, and sometimes I held the scareder little ones on my lap.

“I don't believe the orphans are the ones who cut Penny's head nearly off. I was in the building where her and Gene's room was. I think it was Man Mortimer.”

“Mortimer?” Egan shouted. “He was here?”

Wren said, “He was here, walked right through everything like a floating head of hair protected against gun lead and explosives. The orphans saw the pleasure boat approaching and opened fire, and the white father-killer had taught them how to shoot. Dr. Harvard was driving the boat with Mortimer and his mother in it, but he didn't seem a willing pilot. Large Lloyd and Edie were aboard too, Edie holding a derringer on Harvard. Harvard had an old shotgun with him and a few shells, and there was a snake pistol and flares in the survival locker. When the shooting started, Mortimer and Lloyd and Edie hit the deck and returned fire as Harvard tried to turn the boat around again, but Mortimer jumped off the boat and waded to shore. He didn't turn back as his mother fell dead on the bow.

“The older girls, that first pair in trouble with the video lesbian girls thing, were snapping those guns, one with a telescope on it. They wanted to hurt Mortimer personally, owed him. But he walked right ashore, and I can't imagine them not having a clean shot.

“It got to where I was making peace, I was a peacemaker. I brought back peace and trust in adult humans, kept them from setting the pleasure boat on fire a second time. I helped them out when it started settling down a little, waiting for the law, gathering ammunition, food and explosives, gasoline, moving barbed-wire fences. Even setting the moat on fire at one point because they'd seen it in the movies right there. You're the first person to come.”

Egan took Wren back over the bridge and drove for Sheriff Facetto.

TWO MONTHS LATER FACETTO PULLED OUT THE ELECTION
over “Who” Hooks, mainly because even the slow caught on to Hooks' own private hysteria toward the end, wherein he fired off a Glock automatic during a rally for crime-fighting. This was too ardent, and Facetto began looking sane.

Melanie was not in love with the man anymore and considered him an inept coward. She was annoyed by his breathy dramatic pauses and rises when he told her about arresting Mortimer and taking a deposition from Wren. This community's nightmare treated as if it were some trivial dramatic work that had floated past a theater workshop he was in. She told him he was childish and she did not want a child in the house anymore.

Sheriff Facetto was more than disconsolate. He ceased being.

On the complaint of the body-shop man Ronny, Facetto's deputy Bernard arrested Man Mortimer at his junkyard. Mortimer was looking for something among the wrecked cars. He told Bernard this arrest was impossible, since the whole county worked for him. Yet he was led away in cuffs as his father and Peden looked on.

Mortimer began telling his whole story then and would not be quiet.

Facetto would not look at his face during his confessions at the station. Looking at the ceiling, the sheriff at last told him to please be quiet, please.

“Nobody is listening to you anymore,” said Facetto.

“But I am, sir,” said Bernard.

“We've got plenty. Make him quit talking.”

Facetto soon left town for a far, far state.

Mortimer would not stop talking in Parchman Prison, either. Nobody wanted him near them. The thing that was hardly anything but a big head with a mass of white hair on it kept reciting his misdeeds. And further, the discourtesy and irony you found so widely practiced. In all his years at the prison, he never got up to the death of his mother or walking through all that lead until he freed Gene and Penny. Nor Penny's death. The new sheriff was willing to accept the town's certainty that Mortimer was the killer and left it at that.

John Roman and Max Raymond drew closer together, but Roman did not want anybody talking with him while he fished, and he did not like talking God at all. His wife Bernice was well. He loved God cautiously. He did not know how long this love would last.

Harvard and Melanie were married by Peden on the pleasure barge. Their marriage was that of pals after a fight and long silence. It had become too late in time for fights, and often even memories. They clung.