Yonder Stands Your Orphan (10 page)

The problem of claim on the car might not be a problem. Who owned a sinkhole below the land after all? But less clear was whether the car was on Feeney's land or the disused grounds of the orphans' camp. They did not intend to ask the couple who owned and ran the camp. This fragile team stayed on Mars, it seemed to the boys, and discipline was so loose that they had seen many an orphan in Redwood and even Bovina when Harold took the family out to eat. They smoked and purchased naked muscle-women magazines, but most of them were nice enough, good playmates. They liked heavy metal too.

The ultimate goal of most heavy-metal rockers is to catch a sensitive wretch such as Michael Stipe of REM alone in a cow pasture and drive over him in a raid of motorcycles
and war Rottweilers. The priest was quiet, however, like Beckett, and organized Gothic invasions of the Vatican itself in his mind when the hard stuff was on. He was in the woods with his rifle now, and he did not know what his dog was into. He could swear he heard bursts of grumbling heavy metal in the woods down to the east. He walked slowly, smoking Players one after the other, hungover on Colt 45 malt liquor, a can of which was cold in his pocket for the moment of necessity.

The boys went straight to work. They were going to ask the priest about the car but decided not to, because nobody knew quite how seriously to take the .22 Magnum. Feeney had shot nothing yet but a yard jockey he had stolen down the lake, from the lawn of white people he detested.

His nephew Egan had tried to take the gun away from him, but he would have had to take on a whole fresh paranoia, a job close to sweeping out a large hospital. Egan would lecture the old man patiently. Except for the idea of his trespassed land, his uncle remained still an ethical Christian without want or hope for material. Even his alcoholism could be moderate, leaving the juice alone three straight days with no real sickness. Egan held up his prized old switchblade with the Mexican flag colors one afternoon and offered to throw it as far out in the woods as he could if his uncle would throw that rifle the same. There was still much goth in Egan, he knew it. He did not think Christian heavy metal was possible, only heavy metal, but it might be the music of Christ's deepest anger with the whip against the money changers in the temple. The next trip to the lodge, he saw the old man had brought the rifle back in and had a whole new box of shells for it, polishing them, as no sane rifleman ever did. Some of the dogs were going unfed, they urinated and excreted in the hallways.

Egan was worried sick about the sanitation and even more about the fellow shooting an orphan or some other child around the land. Somebody just fishing for crappie in the grotto pond, one of the prettiest natural-spring pools he'd ever seen, where Christ Jesus might have knelt in his loneliness for solace from the ailing masses and baffled disciples. Egan was going to have to put his uncle in Onward, but Egan had no money, and the church had stopped its insurance for the old man. There was nothing. Egan had sold his own Harley Softail, an act that broke his heart. The IRS had taken his Triumph Tiger. He had an old Nissan and no more credit at the hardware store to fix the lodge or his three churches. No more credit at the Robert E. Lee Motel, where they had cut him a nice break by the month. His wife had left him for another Christian biker who still had his Harley, brand-new at $22,000, $5,000 more in leather bags and honcho seat and tank, very righteous. Egan was looking at nothing but a last supper. He had only a hundred bucks. Without the good gas mileage of the ancient Nissan, he could not have made it to Yazoo City.

He loved to go there to visit the grave of an old pal of his, the writer Willie Morris, who had kidded him once with the question “If you were fourth and fifteen on your own one-yard line in the last thirty seconds of the game, would Jesus know what to do?” Egan had laughed wildly. “Of course! Bomb to Peter. No other choice.”

“Peter dropped the ball for Christ at the crucifixion, my friend,” said Morris.

“That's why he ain't ever going to drop one again, Willie.”

The past weeks, the weather come over his own grave now, Egan thought deeply of killing the both of them, nephew
and uncle, with the gun. But he couldn't. He was not good enough to see God yet, and the old man was worse. An alternative had presented itself, but Egan was not ready to admit it.

Feeney's dogs were all over the trunk, and the boys had to kick them back. But the Lord smiled on them then. They heard the old man go back to his lodge, called loudly by his nephew, who had a new car in the drive. A big shiny luxury SUV.

Harold always had the tools. He was from an old stripe, those who fixed everything broken in history. You do not understand how they carry the right tools in those thin white overalls, but they were there around the P-51s and C-47s in the Big One. Nobody cared about them but the fliers who knew. Such a mechanic was Harold.

He popped the trunk and pulled up the lid, and the two boys and Sponce ran backwards like hares through tall grass and bushes. So fast they were out of sight, and Harold was left caught in a cloud of rot, so bad he thought these things in the trunk were huge dead catfish for a minute. They weren't, and he got back quickly too. Missouri tag. Who would leave the tag? Only a drugged idiot, the man who was now walking swiftly through the four acres of trees and fronds, having heard noise. He held his uncle's rifle.

The mother and child were collapsed in soured meat. So vile they arose with smell and commenced being skeletons almost instantly. To Harold they seemed to sigh while doing it. The boys had come back to within fifty feet.

“This bitchin' car's older'n me,” said Harold. “Sorry for cursing, boys.”

“Ransom,” said Sponce.

“How you know their name?” the smaller boy asked.

“Ransom is a
thing
, dickweed. Somebody kidnapped these two and held them out for ransom but cheated and killed them or nobody paid.”

“These folks is ours,” said the older child.

“What could you pissants do with them old folks?”

The children began to behave as interns of science, walking and thinking, not too close to the trunk yet, but seeing the car might be saved.

“That is a mother and child. You could boil them bones so they not putrid and set them up with wires and it would be a family, him Jesus the baby and her Mary at Halloween, and you could have Christmas both.”

“They start Christmas the day after Halloween at Big Mart, anyway,” said Harold. “But what you mean, have? Where would you have them?”

“Like on a float in a parade, or you could make that car into a convertible if the top's not no good and ride them in the backseat.”

“Why? Who the hell would be looking?”

“To scare 'em.”

“You mean the man that did this, if it is a man?”

“Well him too, but he'd be dead too, wouldn't he? If he was older than this car, or you, Harold.”

“You boys ever hear of Sherlock Holmes?”

“No.”

“Well you ain't him. You got your detective work running around the barn to hump itself.” This speech by Sponce made Harold very uncomfortable. Despite the T-shirts, he was on a new program to stop using the little bad language he did. He wanted to be an influence on these children, in hopes of giving Dee another one someday.

Egan looked on from the last strand of scrub pine and winter wheat.
My God. If I run them off and get that tag
.
If I can even make myself do that. You go through life asking when do I use the rifle. These boys aren't even trespassing. The thing is, I could kill myself after I crawl in the trunk with that pair, if they would leave and give me enough time. What they want is that car. All the rest is my hell, not theirs
.

It is this far I am now from my Christ
.

Take me back
.

Or forward
.

There ain't no standing here, Lord
.

I just as much as slaughtered Mary and child seven years ago
.

When Man Mortimer got out of the hospital, he wasn't through hurting for a good long while and was almost unmanned. But then he watched his only video and felt the stirring of loin sympathy and was mildly satisfied. He drove to Monroe, Louisiana, in Egan's old Nissan, ordered a meal at a drive-in, which he never did because he might be seen patronizing one of these things, and when the car waiter came out with the chili dog and diet Pepsi, Mortimer reached out the window as if to offer the boy a long column of change, but it was a box cutter instead. He cut down the whole length of the kid's forearm, which caused him to shriek and almost faint, scattering the food. Mortimer drove off hastily and left behind smudges of the Nissan's old tires.

Last night at one of his homes, the big fifties-ranch-style one, he had watched on his large flat-screen Phillips television the film clips and recitation of a minister. A curious breed of faith, perhaps not even Christian.

“Why do people look for science, science fiction and signs of the End? Why do they seek the Revelation of the Apocalypse here and there and chant the old chants of the coming of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen? Science fiction
has already been
had
, fools. It was the Battle of Kursk, German tanks against Russian tanks, fifty-seven years ago. It was Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, idiots! What does it take, a sock in the jaw for you to get it that the Forces of Darkness fought
then
? The Antichrist on both sides. Piss on
Star Wars
. Nothing touches WW Two for science fiction and wasteland.

“What else do you need? Can't you see that things are
better
now? That the prophets are winning
more
battles? Where they are losing is At Home. Plenty and boredom and people are killing because they got, get this, no other imagination! And you have Mormons, for God's sake! What the hell is that? And who, by the way,
is
president of this Space Walk? You got any idea? You got a TV, don't you? I thought so. You don't have a clue in hell who our President or His Wifeness
are
. Now that's some science fiction. Our President will never kill himself, but if he did, as he ought, he would wonder who was performing the act. And our First Lady would name a different murderer three days running. Is this what the school of Yale does for people? My aching ass. Give me Harry Truman from our worst community college. He'd be on the roll,
The Roll
, there at last! Shut up!”

Mortimer thought he himself was the point of this address, that he was still suffering from a dizziness rushing from the nads. Behind the man, pictures of Nazis and Russians blowing each other apart in the cauldron kept running, and one of the Russian soldiers in the bowl-shaped helmets looked a great deal like him. This man was directing fire and using binoculars near artillery pumping up and down in a plain of mud. The man looked like the singer Fabian but stealthy and gung-ho, as if he had stumbled into an important movie.

The afternoon after his work at the Monroe drive-in, Mortimer was still in Egan's car, a blue thing going for a
record in mileage and fading. He was not sure why he had traded cars, but now he was glad for the incognito and ease of parking. He had a feeling he would get more hooks into Egan yet. He parked under a century oak curved over the drive at Onward. He waited until the hour satisfied him and went around back. When he looked inside the door, he was clear. There was nothing to hurt in the first room, just chairs and a blood pressure cuff. In the next, however, was a nice cabinet with all of Melanie Wooten's glass animals in a miniature African-plains scene, done with extraordinary patience and care. Giraffes, wildebeests, tigers, lions, monkeys, panthers, elephants. He picked up the whole scene in the swathe of green burlap and crushed it under his Johnson & Murphy wing-tip loafers. He had dust and glass specks on them now. He heaved up the sack and set it as a bag of trash, matchstick trees, shoe-dye water holes, on the cabinet where it had waited for the patients to enjoy. Then he slipped out the back, just about on the spot when nap time at Almost There was done.

Much dither broke out on the discovery of the animals soon afterward. Melanie came in for her readings while it was going. She didn't want this, but one of the elderly patients had already called the sheriff's office by the time Melanie arrived. Dee Allison awoke without actually sleeping, as she often did. “Number one, Mrs. Wooten,” she told Melanie, “I have no idea who did this. But the sheriff is not going to come out about a case of smashed glass animals.”

“Oh I know. I'm embarrassed. He can't be that bored. Who would even take the time to
do
this?”

“I don't know anybody who would even come here on purpose,” said Dee.

But the sheriff did come out. He had a good build and short hair and, when he neglected to modulate his voice,
did not sound even remotely southern. Delaware, maybe. He admitted he liked espresso very much and was pleased there was a machine here, along with very modern books on all subjects, weight loss, sexual improvement, racy novels. Bleden's huge child-psychology tome
If They Were My Child
. The sheriff's name was Facetto. He performed in plays with the Vicksburg Theater League and had never played a lawman, even when he was in college in Mexico. Dee Allison had not seen his television meditations on the law and the world on the evening news each Saturday night, but he did have a presence. They said he was New Breed, this young high sheriff of Issaquena County. He knew, or talked anyway, psychology and the demographics of crime.

“This is the work of a teenager who may be having early bursts of schizophrenia. Most likely. I'll get prints, but it won't lead anywhere, I'll bet. The girl won't even remember doing it, I'd guess. Tragic. We had a boy in a youth group when I was young, we all went to the circus, but he attacked the bedroom of our den mother and tore it to shreds. He didn't know why, we surely didn't, he'd been urged to go to the circus with us. He was quiet, tall, barely whispered. The attack was his language. I'll never forget him. Dillon Brad.”