Yonder Stands Your Orphan (12 page)

Sponce Allison, matched with Harold Laird, was in the alley of the tinned meat, saltines, fireplugs and prophylactics and salt and coffee. When they collided, Sidney coiled and puked a bright yellow line that never even made an arc before it smacked Sponce in the cheek.

“Ho doggit!” The boy was amazed. Gravy ran down his eyes and dripped in a beard off his face.

Sidney still drooled in a lip-wide stalactite down his own chin. He was undergoing stress, a rapid melancholy that overcame him once he had vomited on another person. This thing wanting out of him so quickly, like a hot weasel in a tube.

Old Pepper, behind the counter near the screen door, raised his hooded scowl. Last night he had seen a mother and baby skeleton in one of the ruined bass boats, he thought, and heard a scurrying off through the edge of his porch light into a stony field. He did not credit it fully, but neither did he tell anybody, because his son wanted this store and Pepper knew it and he would give no psychiatric evidence against himself else the sheriff or Onward might be called. He enjoyed a beaked scowl now before the odor hit him, over that of weltering meat under the lamps nearby. He almost smiled.

His boy was staggering out from the mouth of his premium aisle, now toward all the bright spinner baits and bush hogs and jigs, the solid Rapallas like Picasso, the Sluggos, the salty worms, the wobbling deep-running torpedoes, the high-tech sonic ones that rattled and rolled. The single fishing
video entitled
You Are in the Wrong Place
. A wet boy behind Sidney.

Sidney had not apologized, and the boy was stunned by this discourtesy. But Sidney feared a second eruption and so did his father. Others wanted him out of the store too. But the Allison boy now held him across his neck. He demanded some acknowledgment.

All his working life Pepper had sold instruments of violence against fish and game and some people. He had war-surplus bayonets from Korea. But he had never struck his son, wife or enemies. He was too remote in his hatreds for this. He would have shot his son just then if he had owned the energy. He did hiss as Sponce rode the seed of his lap out into the porch.

“Here now, here now,” called Harold Laird. He was a born remonstrator.

“This old man vom on me!”

“I'm sick, sick, you sons of bitches! Don't you see?” swore Sidney, then threw out his arms to free himself. His long-sleeved shirt was spotless, the drool gone. He seemed hardly involved. He walked over to the end of his car and, breathless, looked upward dead-on at the sun. Now he was a blind old puke and swore again.

“By gawd you're stunk out,” said Harold to Sponce. “You ain't aiming to get in my ride thataway?” Laird had a nice old Camry. He had left Hermansville last year and never looked back, except to retrieve his four-wheel ATV and tools.

“Tell you what. I'm standing here waiting on a goddamn explanation. Or manners at least.”

“Old man, don't you want to tell him something?”

Sidney turned away from them toward the horizon. Shingles, colon cancer, psoriasis, mouth ulcers, dysentery. In his mind these old friends called out to his young tormentors.

“All right then. Here.” Sponce walked up to Sidney in the gravel lot and hit him in the right jaw with a quick roundhouse left, then knelt in pain himself for the damage to his hand. He might never work on that side of his body again.

Pepper was in the door watching. He was satisfied. Sidney was out cold or stunned, one. But he still stood, arms at hips.

It was an awful thing to watch a sick old man slugged. The boys were uncomfortable. One was in severe pain. So they entered the car, which was suddenly irreal, out of all space and time, hurtling fast to nowhere with its points of chrome light on the hot blue wall of sky.

Nobody came near Sidney, no customers, not Egan the preacher, with his own problems and oblivious. It was Egan's habit to purchase one pack of Camel straights, light and smoke one, then throw the rest of the pack in the road as a sign of his conversion and for good luck. Cigarettes were $3.20 a pack. He was deciding, needing a smoke badly.

Sidney spoke. “Well then. I can make other things die.” He staggered back up the steps of the bait store. “Pepper. Give me a pack of twenty-two long-rifle hollow points. The Winchester. Not the cheap stuff.”

Pepper handed on the little box without comment. There were many snakes around, but he didn't care about that either.

The boys did not feel right. Bereft, divested, exasperated into sickness from the old man. It hit almost immediately. They drove in circles, then they walked that way.

“It ain't been right since them skeletons. Them kids loose with them.” Sponce was irritated at Harold for wiring the skeletons together for his brothers. “You promising that car to them.”

“We made a deal, a square deal.”

“Remind me, genius.”

“They would pay on the installment when they could. Or get parts for me as they found them.”

“I stink.”

“Don't I know it. I'm sick myself, son.”

“I'm sick as a dog, Hare. But what do you get if you keep taking us all out to eat at night. Steak and Ale, Red Lobster. I'm too sick to talk food. Aw.”

The deal that had been struck without Sponce's knowledge was that the little boys would persuade their mother to put out to Harold, and then Harold would become their father, in the proper way, after a divorce from their gone father.

“I can still afford it. Mechanics is big money if you get serious, which I have been since eleven and started smoking then too. I quit the smoking, you notice. The swearing too.”

“But you ought to get a new hairdo. That one's too college.”

“You don't know but what I might go on up to Ole Miss or Southern, even State if I'm good enough. Your own mother went to a Jackson nursing college. High education's in your blood, son.”

“I remember that zoo over there. A good un.”

“I didn't notice a hell, heck of a lot right before we found the skeletons, and the car came with it.”

“You got a rust bucket. And the bullets in they's head. Them skeletons belong to the law, Hare.”

“The law didn't care to find them, did it? Seven or eight years. And that car ain't rusted that deep. You just can't see the form like I can.”

“How long till you get it running?”

“Seventeen years. They said teenage car,” Hare joked. They would have laughed but they were too sick. Then they got back in the car and drove some more. Sometimes, in fact usually, a man had to just burn gas. Let the big dog eat. They wanted to drive across the Vicksburg bridge for no reason except to change states, but they were too sick and had to come back home.

“Hare, you ain't given Dee the prize yet that'd make her . . . that'd move her toward that surrender. I mean marriage. Them two old guys gave her this, that and the other and she laughs and says it don't get them anywheres. Even if you're in love with her.”

“I got patience. And I'm changing quick.”

“Yeah. You're all wore out from being nice.”

“I ain't had but one day since I met her that I wasn't in love with her, and that wasn't her fault. That's when the flesh boiled off them skeletons.”

The sheriff was doing a five-minute commentary on the Weekend Review on television Saturday night. Both Dee and Melanie watched.

“The world is full of middle-aged men who seek revenge. The anger passes for most when they see there is no way. The rate of incarceration is very low for first-time offenders of sixty. For some, there is a bigger engine of hate even then, running at the red line and very vigilant toward what they might consider insults or even bossiness. They aren't just having it, the engine, like the others. They
are
it. They have not been aware of this, and their acts confound them. Those are ones you see on television or in the newspapers discussing sodomy, rape, kidnapping and murder in the passive voice, something happened, somebody was killed
and so on, sometimes even giggling. ‘Mistakes were made, yes, when she was killed. I can't remember, really.' Such as that.”

Such a pompous ass
, thought Dee. Though she admitted the guy was hot. She had seen him and Melanie, twice his age, having a moment as he went out the door at Onward. Mrs. Melanie Wooten of the linen slacks, black slippers, a Martha Stewart hang of bangs. Dee could not believe the sheriff was gone for an old woman. But he was beginning to be.

Besides acting in local theater, the sheriff rode a Norton motorcycle. The people of the county were not clear on what man they had. He was handsome and very verbal. These things were measured against him. Many women, however, wanted to see his warm gun and dreamed, since there was little else to do.

THE SMALL BOYS LIVED ON RAISINS OUT OF A BOX TWO
nights in Blackjack, a ghost trailer-home village. There had never been much of the natural graces here. It was just a hill with a curved narrow pavement across it like a bad part in tan hair. Winter wheat, chaff stalks, stunted pines. Right up to the right of way. Old electric poles, downed wires. Kudzu stopped at the slabs of the old precincts. Repeated fires from years gone by, cigarettes tossed out, the seepage of chemical toilets. But still a town of hulks, with alleys.

Both boys kept combs in their pockets and groomed their strange but pretty hair often, sensing their beauty in this desolation. They were on a fast without knowing it. They were not particularly hungry and their energy was high, their heads clear and visionary, with the Benson & Hedges 100s they puffed now and then. They were in minor ecstasy.

The black T-shirts with the obscenities on the chest were baggy and stretched out. Sometimes hung out to dry after washing in a creek. The boys were thin and muscular. Their line had furnished the crafty retreaters and battlefield scavengers since Shiloh. Such men whose craven disappearance had only begun the troubles of their enemies.

Mortimer had seen them on the highway shoulder with the bones on a cart. He was driving a Lincoln Continental at the time and was incredulous until he drove two more miles, then credulous but confused, then in Rolling Fork he turned around white with concern. He parked his car in a square two miles from their home and worked his way in on foot, so he would not be seen. You could not heave
a big cart without at least a path, he thought. He could not go to the Allison house yet. He would see Dee soon enough. The physical absence from her was hurting him, so he knew he was at least a third healthy, although not right, or he couldn't have borne it at all.

He seemed every minute to cross the borderline of a small foreign land. He had not spent any time walking in the country. Otherwise he could have hidden the people better himself than the idiot Egan, who would pay soon. Egan the man of God who had borrowed Mortimer's money. What a fraud in all ways.
Does everybody just act and lie?
Mortimer thought. He felt in quicksand, in alligators.

Now he was in Blackjack, near where he had seen the boys and their cargo. A great bomb might have hit here, deeps on either side of the road and the ghost of the trailer park hove into view on the right. He immediately saw a child running between the burned-out hulks and got out of his car, the engine still on. In his right hand he held an absurd knife such as you saw only in pawnshops. Of not even commando utility, it was so huge. It had a saw blade on one edge and most likely would have been more shiny than it was sharp had Mortimer not made it a project. You could hack off the stump of a yucca plant with it.

He trotted down an alley and looked in the blasted and rusted door frames. Past a ghost fence that was barely an idea of wire and rot. Then he had one cornered in a trailer with his nasty black T-shirt on. He could smell the boy and raced into where it was nearly black and caught him by the arm. “I'll cut your head off if you. . . .” The boy resisted, then stopped.

It was noon and no shadows and Mortimer was sweating hard in his sports jacket. A little pistol fell out of his pocket, but neither of them noticed this. The other boy
came running toward them, bounding, enraged and driven by fear at the same time, like no animal.

“Believe me, boy. Your brother best stop right there too. Ease on up.” Now Mortimer had the boy by his hair and grabbed for the other with his knife hand. This was not a good idea. He nicked the boy fairly well on the shoulder, and the boy shook loose as his brother plunged his fist into Mortimer's gonads. Mortimer held on, however, and now the hitter saw the blood on his brother's shoulder and desisted altogether. A lamb shaking with fear.

Mortimer grabbed the boy's hair again more tightly by the trailing rattail in back. “You come over here for a haircut or you run and it's . . . a head cut,” he said slowly and way short of breath.

“We ain't hurt you.”

“But you stink and I don't like you.” Mortimer sawed the boy's hair loose and it fell in a black lank. He indicated the other to come over. The first was holding the back of his scalp but looking at the enormous knife, almost a cutlass. Mortimer sawed the other's beaver hang, really just touched it, and it came off in his hand too. “Now you look more, more nicer. Like boy people. You shouldn't wear your hair like rock and roll when you your age. Like you mated up with some old Mexican beaver.” He bent down to chat on their level. “Now where's your cart with your friends on it?”

The boys simply ran. Why could he not have thought about that?

He looked for them awhile. Too tired for the same rage, he took on another one, a cold haunting in the cells of his blood that would not leave him until an awful thing was done. He hollered out into the thicker woods, though still scraggly, all around him. “I see you with it, I'll put you in
the orphanage or the penitentiary!” He walked short distances yelling this.

When he left, the boys came out. It was within the hour. You could hear a car a long ways here, could almost hear the browning pines bake. So few cars came by at all. You would be cursed to have trouble here, amid the trailer hulks taking on shadows and figures down alleys, mouths. The boys ate from the box of raisins and vowed to go on home. The cart was way back on the other side of the lake, not too far behind the bad restaurant and Max Raymond's cottage. Then Isaac looked down and saw the little pistol. He picked it up very carefully.