Yonder Stands Your Orphan (6 page)

The couple had dreamed once of an empire of condominiums at Eagle Lake, but that had stopped. Three times they had been threatened by angry callers. In this state live men and women nostalgic by age eleven. For things rambling, wooden, rain-worn, wood-smoked, slightly decrepit. The heft of dirty nickels. They flee to lakes from hateful pavements, concrete and glass. They are certain the great wars were fought for cheap fishing licenses.

More than by the telephoners, the couple had been stopped by the death of their young son in a school-bus accident. The lad was smashed, tossed. They had done nothing but fish since they lost him. Bass, crappie and bluegills. They favored the fly rod, an Episcopalian method in these parts. They fished too for catfish at night with a lantern on their boat. Monsters lay deep in this lake, so strong they could move their boat around like a sea fish when they were on. Gene and Penny frowned all the while now, as if trying to read a book in a foreign language. The book of rising each morning and for what? They hardly looked at each other. They returned to the huge cottage worn and sunburned.

When they ate at the awful restaurant, which some of the old fellows from the cove frequented, they were perfect
consumers of its fare. They cared nothing for what they ate and barely noticed it. The old men thought it remarkable that the two of them had settled into this speechless apathy at so young an age, when two of the old fellows had waited decades to earn this pleasure from their own wives.

Sidney loved it. “They chanced to look at the other one and they'd kill the bastard, seems like. My word, it stirs the memory.”

Unbeknownst to the other, each had saved up the tranquilizers prescribed for them in their grief over their lost son. They did not begin taking them until the second week in the house, in a lull of energy for fishing. She complained that both the fish and the water smelled like birth, and then they came back to the cabin on the lip of the swamp, which smelled like birth and diapers, itself. Then the restaurant, where the bathroom was the same. But they could not quit going to these places. They began leaving clusters of fish, uncleaned, ignored, around the house. They were barely eating. They began drinking vodka with Gatorade.

After four days in this haze, she saw him lying naked and fat on the bed asleep and cut his member with a fillet knife. He bled a great deal and needed stitches, but they went nowhere. He rocked with a towel in his lap and they talked it over and he forgave her. The next day they went fishing together.

At suppertime she called him to the kitchen, where it was dark. The rest of the house was dim, two bare bulbs somewhere. She stood at the doorjamb with a finger to her lips for him to be quiet. He stood by her awhile, and she said, “He's there, eating.” She meant their son. He blinked, and he did see something in the chair at the table. “He needs all his nourishment. So long now without eating,” she said. When she left for sleep, he walked to the chair and found
the shape to be a tree limb she had brought in from the back and placed there. He cried but embraced the limb.

Then she began calling the ground evil, she could feel the evil in it right through her boat shoes. She felt men fighting, women struggling, animals fleeing. The groans of it shook her feet. They launched their boat on the water, but they drove it, a very nice cedarwood classic, very slowly, like old people with no purpose in an automobile. They never changed clothes anymore except to sleep naked.

They left the lake now and then, driving a Saab, again at the speed of elderly people in bad weather. The woman could not stand the voices that came in the window if they went any faster. They went to a cash machine in Vicksburg and withdrew thousands of dollars. The money was piled or scattered all over the house and they paid no attention to it. Apparently it was intended as
getaway
money, but they never left. They continued to fish and leave the fish about. Big catfish too, from the lantern fishing. They were pros. They answered neither the phone in the house nor the one in the boat. The phones kept ringing.

In the second week they bought tools in Vicksburg. Every movement was very slow now. If they heard the hammering from the restaurant across the meadow, the denizens might have wondered why anybody would put such effort into rental property. The husband began nailing everything he owned to the walls. Pants, belts, underwear and his fishing tackle, plug by plug. Nailed right through the breast of Lucky Thirteen, Dive-bomber, plastic worms.

Then he nailed up the fish, what grip he could find on what had rotted from the first week. He nailed up her clothing, panties and even Tampax. Then he slept, with the unnailed piles of tackle and money around him. He had begun nailing the money, but there was a lot. Pictures of his
real estate office, photos of desirable lots. Big red Seconals and other pills scattered across the throw rugs.

The swamp got louder. The crane flew and brought a great shadow past the windows. The limb stayed where it was in their chair in the kitchen.

He was asleep on the bathroom tiles when she stabbed him again, this time in the thigh, just missing his testicles. He had never healed properly from the first assault, and this wound was deep. He heard her in the kitchen talking to the limb. The knife still hung in his thigh while he hit her across the back of the head with the flat of a shovel. Then he nailed her foot to the wall in the living room while she was unconscious, and then one of her hands.

He hammered a six-inch rafter spike through the meat of his left heel and was trying to do the same for his left hand when he either passed out or went to sleep. Both of them were full of Dilaudid, a narcotic used in recovery from lung and heart surgeries and sold at huge prices on the streets.

The phone kept ringing deep into the night. The sullen restaurateur was not stirred by their screams, but they brought Sidney Farté, Pete Wren and Dr. Harvard to the house. Then the odor, when they got in the viney yard. Under the hollering, the singer Aaron Neville crooned from the jambox, “Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” heaving out his grace notes to soprano. But way over that the hollers, now husky female and then croaking male. They were out of drugs, drink, mobility. The old men almost did not go in. An aggressive mirage when they opened the front door. But soon Harvard knelt and did what he could, and somebody telephoned.

Along with the ambulance came the new sheriff of the county. It was their first look at him. He was young for
the job and had a master's in criminology from a school in Mexico. He seemed to be borrowing a southern accent for the benefit of the locals, and they thought him a bit too confident, not as impressed by this event as he should be. When the awe wore off, Sidney Farté felt all warm and lucky to have chanced on this crucifixion.

Months later but unrecovered, mildly brain-damaged, Penny preferred charges and sued her husband. He counter-charged. They limped into court eighteen months later in Jackson. So much was revealed that each side retired and the gallery went away in disgust, horror and pity. Sated. In the middle of the litigation, the Ten Hoors fell back in love.

Or, at any rate, in their wreckage they had found the uncontrollable pity that calls itself love. They wept and fell together. Their new vows did not stop here. Across the lake was a deserted barracks and barn and fifty acres contained by a broken fence of storm wire, a former quarters for a football and majorette summer camp, and this maimed and devoted couple began to convert the camp into a resort for orphans. They kept four horses and a pleasure barge, with fields for softball, archery, volleyball and badminton, horseshoes. They built a hall for movie nights. Catastrophe had brought their earnestness together. Sworn to give something back, they fell more deeply in love. A few weeks back the first orphans had come.

The ex-doctor Max Raymond practiced his saxophone, tuned to this house of chaos and horror. It was spring, or starting to be, and he felt the ghosts passing and then struggling down the green alleys of the deeps in the swamp behind them. His wife sometimes sang, perhaps for the animals and birds, alone on the back stoop. Her voice was pure, lush and sweet, unconscious of ugly history.

Raymond was fishing from the other side of the pier from the old men at work on their own barge when another came over from the orphans' camp across the lake, twin Evinrudes putting behind, children at the rails. White, black, Vietnamese, Mexican. But they were all speaking like immigrants who knew only a few phrases of obscenity in English. The wife was at the stern trying to lead these children in song. They ignored her. Nevertheless, Penny kept smiling radiantly. Gene was at the wheel, also smiling with a sort of witless beatitude. The couple were still sallow and drawn from their calamity, no longer handsome but invested by their great pity. The children around them made rutting motions and blew noises on their arms. A small one urinated on the deck. All the while, many others were yelling filth. Reviling the dignity of this geriatric gallery on the pier. But the husband steered as if all was in hand and each child adorable. The wife kept leading the song. A vision beyond comment until they left and trolled southward to the dam.

Raymond thought of Malcolm, the rival he had destroyed. Did he look like the couple did now? Lunatic, pale, slumped. The idiotic hope in their faces. “I'm happy there's a lake between us and that,” said Wren.

It looked like something, well, unlicensed. “My first look at them since they were hauled off in the ambulance,” said Dr. Harvard. “Poor people. Crippled. Thinking they're doing good.”

“You seen everything that's wrong with this fucking U.S.A. aboard that scow,” said Sidney. He had a deep chest cold and had been enjoying heaving up phlegm and spitting the gouts into the water, going for distance.

Two of the orphans were well-figured girls, maybe fourteen, both smoking cigarettes, their faces already set hard, their eyes already gone whoring, leers ready. Each of
the old recalled them in his own way. Glittering eyes of a lizard. Troubled homes, troubled streets. A foreign perfume in these dreams. Old men eaten alive. A mindless revival of unspoken sins. Death by arousal.

Raymond watched their faces. Then he looked up the yard at Melanie coming down the hill, bringing cold beers to them. Sweetness and light, he thought. She was amazing. A face and body kept lineless by virtue, self-sacrifice.

Ulrich had been quiet, painting on deck varnish. Now he spoke. “We don't love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody's been futurized. You look in those eyes and see they're not home, they're some hours ahead at least. I hate to go into Vicksburg anymore. Anywhere, really. It's all like meeting people who have just departed. Old men and women don't look wise anymore. They are just aged children. And who gets the highest pay? Actors. Paid to mimic life because there is no life. You look at everybody and maybe they're a little sad, some of 'em. They're all homesick for when they were real.” Ulrich began painting again as the others tried to guess what could have prompted this.

“Did you see them orphans?” asked Sidney.

“Orphans?” asked Ulrich. “Who isn't an orphan, I ask you?”

Sidney had a living father who he wished were dead. Pepper Farté hated almost everything that moved. To buy something in his bait house was like pulling goods from the hands of a vicious hermit. When Sidney himself entered the store, the older man became livid, angry at the custom that demanded you acknowledge your son. Sidney was going to correct Ulrich, but then he recalled these matters and merely sneered.

“When you're crazy like me, the brain keeps you warm. I haven't had a long-sleeve shirt on all year,” Ulrich reflected.

“Shortness of air to the head is what explains you,” said Sidney.

“I wonder who is helping that poor couple with the orphans,” said Melanie. She handed a beer to Ulrich. “I don't think you should be breathing paint in your condition, Mr. Ulrich.” She patted his shoulder. Ulrich painted on. She smiled.

Harvard watched Melanie in reverence.

I could love this woman too
, thought Raymond.
Like a Madonna. Maybe she is all the vision I'll ever get. How can you have a faith without a vision now and then?

The woman has been graceful so long, kind so long
.

A vision cannot be indefinite, an apparition. No, you go down the road and you see something there, dense and none other like it. Those of us who want visions can't have them, maybe. They are given to old fools like Ulrich. I love him too. A better man than I am
. Raymond thought this and then had a bluegill on.
But what of the other night when I became so glad all of a sudden and for no reason that there was an Ireland, and that the natives of its villages were going about their ways, to and fro, from stone cottages and green rocky hills. I had an ecstasy thinking that. What was that?

Melanie walked with her small ice chest back up the pier and continued around the cove on an unknown journey. Her walking made no sense until she rounded the inlet with its thick lily pads, then went on to the point where the black man John Roman sat on his bucket fishing. It began to rain a little. The figures over there were small, but the man watched as she handed the fisherman a cold beer. He took it. The rain sparkled over the bent willows above the two.

Fairly soon, as it began to rain thickly, the pier crowd beheld this woman on the back of Roman's motorbike, clutching his stomach, as he rode them out of the trees and up the long rise to her house. Small figures, they entered her kitchen together.

“Lookee. She's steppin' out on you, Harvard,” said Sidney with a wide sneer. “She been wantin' it, but she can't wait forever, eh, eh.”

This man of great dignity and honors, the man I should have been
, Raymond thought, watching Harvard again, poleaxed by love and this old guttersnipe Sidney. His eloquent white hair flattened out and dripping, eyes stupid. Like a bum with a ruined wig.