Yonder Stands Your Orphan (24 page)

The sheriff met all three in Ruthna's ragged house, an ersatz hacienda with failing cactuses and yuccas about. It was the home of her fifth husband, Harb, who was her ex but still came around to visit with Alexander over a bottle or two now and then. They were friends of Max Raymond and did see Pepper a few minutes before ten that night. But they were depressed and godless, divorced and alcoholic, and their memories were random. Once they were not suspects, they began to be drunk and pathetic in a short space, fighting for narrative time with each other. The sheriff was sorting, writing, reacting. Then he just asked them to shut up.

The night in question they had gnawed bones in a booth of the northside restaurant, Near 'Nuff Food, far superior to the restaurant right at the saxophonist and singer's cottage. Raw beams, linoleum, spiderweb Formica
tabletops, leatherette seats, happy waitresses. A theme. A waitress hurried out and dumped ribs on a heavy paper tablecloth, two rolls of paper napkins.

They wanted to be higher when they left to visit Raymond and the Coyote. They considered themselves urbanites, ignorant of philosophy but crammed with half-remembered songs, which served. They were unhappy, and if God existed, they blamed him for much. The whiskey still worked on them, but they needed more. Ruthna pulled the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo into the gravel lot of the bait store for a last beer. At least ice and cups and Tums. The ribs of Near 'Nuff Food were loggy and scalding in their tender stomachs.

Harb and Ruthna had already begun to fight regarding her past. Alexander went inside and left them to it. A hound watched them all from the porch. Soon enough the fight grew tiresome. They passed a man on a high stool, a note written on an envelope on the counter before him. He was asleep, a football was in the aisle of the store and this was a curious thing, as if somebody had just left off a game of touch. They had a sense somebody was in the back but just left this old man to his sleeping. He was a dry white old creature, leaning on the bulwark of a Lucky Strike display case in which all brands of smokes were stacked. Old Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Roitan cigars, brands that seldom moved in modern towns. The note under his fingers must be a message to customers, they figured.
Out to Lunch
or the like, even though he was there. They got the sack of ice, the plastic cups, the soda, lemons. For a geezer he was well stocked in the needs of the drinking life.

Maybe he was deaf as well as asleep. They couldn't get his attention. Alexander turned the note around, thinking
maybe to wake him. The note seemed oddly personal but scrawled in excitement or carelessness.

I SEEN THE LIGHT AROUND THE CORNER OF THE TUNNEL THEM BASTARDS WAITING FOR ME.

His face was perhaps more purple than was good for a fellow. But he could damn well sleep and they decided this was quaint and in their sleepless tossings they envied him.

They grabbed a bottle from the shelf behind him and went out with the goods, pocketing the cash. They thought this was what the sheriff had come about and this they apologized for. The drink, the weirdness of the scene, their lightness of spirit. Really it was only a prank.

They continued a bit just to hear for themselves what happened the rest of the night once they got to Max Raymond's. They told Raymond about the catatonic man. Old Pepper harked back to Raymond's adolescence, his first night here in a cabin with other boys. The rare night it snowed here. A January with only a few crappie fishermen around. Somebody had insisted Pepper look out at the snow falling thickly in the porch light. He went out, peered briefly and returned.

“Nasty,” he said. Nothing else. Raymond insisted this was modern poetry.

Two thought Raymond was affected. Another fight broke out.

He and the Coyote had been drinking too. She told him the way he clung to his past was morbid. He accused her of having no memories. Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. What was that? She was nowhere, just tits and hair with a voice.

The others took her side. Mimi Suarez said she was not pregnant and was glad.

After a while Alexander and Harb insisted Mimi sing. For song was what was left in the world. Ruthna felt her powers waning and began taking off her clothes. She went out to the back stoop like that and thought she heard boos from nature and her feelings were hurt. She came in and the Coyote passed her and began singing out there with her back to them. Raymond passed the naked Ruthna, dancing. Harb was swaying before her in boxer shorts and black shoes. Alexander watched Mimi's back as she faced the swamp and sang. Presently Raymond accompanied her on the sax. Then he tore her dress off.

Raymond and the weak porch light on Mimi's shoulders and buttocks. Out there kneeling and spying, Sponce, Harold and the little ones were at pains to keep their faces behind the fronds. Mimi was the first woman Harold had seen naked. He looked straight through her as through a lens to his beloved Dee. This woman was not his stopping place, pretty as her voice was, strange as his vantage. The younger boys stayed close to the skeletons.

“I've got more confidence. I'm not scared of melody anymore,” they heard Raymond call to the others. Nobody cared.

The guests lumbered about the rooms in a great sweat, dancing, one nude, wishing themselves lost from their species.

CARL BOB FEENEY WAS DEAD, THE SHERIFF LEARNED
, arriving at the mortuary in Vicksburg. Feeney's nephew had identified the body, but he was not here now. Loved ones do not linger in these precincts. Only the women who sought Christ in the tomb to pay their respects and discovered the resurrection, announced by a frightening young man in all-white garments. Perhaps the writer of the gospel Mark himself, who had fled the law and run naked out of this garment one night long ago at Gethsemane.

But Facetto was not here about Feeney. The mortuary staff had called him with a problem. It was after nine, but lights were on in the basement. A man had been telephoning them at regular intervals, then random ones, about the embalming of an Uncle Ricky, who was not there in any form. Yet the caller insisted they save Uncle Ricky's
head to be arrested
. Who would arrest him? the mortuary director asked him, the caller. Sheriff Facetto, said the caller. He knows this case. Uncle Ricky put his cigarette out on his forehead for twenty years and now his head needed to be arrested. The calls became harassing and then stopped, but they threatened the mortuary and the sheriff both if Uncle Ricky's head did not stand trial alone. It must not go underground or into cremation.

Have mercy on these people who see the living become a thing,
thought the sheriff. Look here, said the dead, I'm going now, but I'll leave you this gray meat to lug around a few hours more. No matter what rattlesnakes the dead were, the living had to salute the leavings. All must submit. He thought
of his father, a small savage marine, proud of his dry heart. The old soldiers around his grave, lying through their teeth. Oh he was the salt of the earth, a man's man. His mother a tall beauty desiccated and driven nearly mute by his company. Like an old television antenna finally, obsolete decades ago.

The man at the car door surprised Facetto. He was already scared.

“I'm Sheriff Facetto. You called?”

“Oh yes, Sheriff.”

“This is about the telephone calls. Uncle Ricky and all that.”

“Yeah, he called again just now.”

“What was the cause of death on Feeney, by the way?”

“A coronary, I think. He had very bad lungs. His nephew said he had become a chain-smoker since leaving the Catholic Church. He was once a priest. He had other diseases. But Lord, he was eighty-two. He came from Ireland and was a missionary to Mississippi. My wife informed me this was a third-world mission field to Irish Catholics.”

“Ireland. All their broods and terrorists. Well.”

“Anyway, we wondered if you could put a trace or stop the calls.”

“This isn't my county. I don't know who's calling, either, or I'd act on it. Sorry, friend.”

Facetto drove off. He felt pulled by dread to nowhere. He'd never even gotten out of his car and had spoken only through the window. He might wobble if he walked, or thrust headlong like a swimmer through this fog. Next week he was onstage again in a production of the Vicksburg Theater League. Now he couldn't remember who he was playing, or what he spoke.

He acknowledged he was a fearful man, but why had this Uncle Ricky call shaken him so much? Horrible laughter and Facetto's ruin were in the voice over the phone. That specter every man might feel at his shoulder. You would turn and here was the shape and face, the awful laughter, the thing pointing at you. It knew who you were and had caught up with you at last. It had seen you faring back and forth in that old woman. Hot Granny. Pulling a long one out of Granny. Hiding her false teeth. He needed sleep. He needed to be out of love.

He felt he reigned in a county which everyone of worth should have left decades ago, all breeds. He dealt with refuse, squatters, the ones gathered around their own nastiness, their own echoes, like night dogs.

Max Raymond returned to the church in the glen where Egan had beat his fists, demonstrated his hypodermic, tossed his ponytail. It was empty but open and he walked to the pinewood altar. All was poignant since Egan's uncle had died and Egan's face had been mutilated. Egan still refused to name the mutilator. Raymond remained silent as well, the bones, his disgrace, the stab wound, which still throbbed in his buttock when he walked or played the sax or even stood too long.

Rain hit on the tin roof. Early shots from the pickets before main engagement. The rain pleased Raymond immensely, as it always did. It whispered, cancel your duty to the outer, get fetal, think of caves. He had loved it at Tulane, where he went to school forever, it seemed. Rain out of Texas and the Gulf. Twilight now, the last of radiant heat sweeping out in the new breezes under the cracked windows with their purple and green glass. Last swirls of color before you drowned, maybe. You could imagine yourself purified by
them, you wanted it.
Clear this mess, Lord. Save me while you're at it.

Raymond waited and then picked up a hymnal. The altar was lit by a single bulb in a reading lamp. He was about to tear out a page and leave a message to Byron Egan.

Outside, a car crunched alongside the church on the pea gravel. He went to the window and saw two boys in an amazing automobile, a 1948 Ford coupe in deep red with a gold hood. The driver could barely see over the panel. The driver did not cut off the engine. The car pushed out a considerable white cloud from the rear. Perhaps blown or crippled by a break. But the thing kept throbbing. The boys seemed to have been stolen by it and made to do its will.
Well, if you can shoot and drive at ten, then it's still the South,
Raymond thought. He raised the window and leaned out as Egan had done many nights ago and lost his face.

“Are you the preacher?” asked the boy behind the wheel.

“No.”

“Are you his friend?”

“I think so.”

“Tell him we wanted him to do this thing right. We gone to have some fun. Might even shoot somebody if we can get him to follow us. We think he seen us and took the bait all right.”

“Stop the car and come in. Don't be rash or dumb now.”

“We carryin' his own pistol. Mortimer's.”

“That's what I mean. No reason to make more trouble.”

“You think the preacher'll be back soon?”

“I imagine. It's Wednesday night. Prayer meeting.”

“You know any other preachers that smoke cigarettes, mister?”

“No I don't, not right off.”

“That's why we chose him. We like him. But we gonna come back when we see his car here with yours.”

They were underage, undersize, underfed even. But in the vehicle they had dignity, and you did not think of children but grim little men. Wild smoke out the back and the two meager heads, pledged to this red and golden absurdity. A casino roundup car. They drove off very solemnly with the bad shifting. The car lurched from its own colors, then went smoother in the third gear.

He waited for the preacher a while longer. Maybe there was no prayer meeting here. Or canceled while Egan was mourning for his uncle Feeney. Yet Man Mortimer might be close to the boys. Raymond could stand being a coward only just a little bit longer. He left.

When the preacher did come a half hour later, there was a pile of crushed bones on the top step of the church porch. He knew at once what they were. He had money in his pocket for an installment on his loan. Mortimer did not need to go voodoo on him. But the man was apparently enjoying the reach of his evil now. Rushing into symbols, always a sign of some disorder, decided the preacher, much reformed since those years of the Maltese crosses and crossbones of the bikers. He wanted to ride, to drink, to smoke. He had started smoking again several weeks back. Nobody liked it, and he tended to hide his butts like a schoolboy would. In trees, rest rooms, the cup of his hand.

Egan was not too mournful. Taking Uncle Carl Bob to Onward would have been sadder. Now he had a surplus
of money, really, a home, dogs, cats, land. Two priests had attended the small funeral in Vicksburg. They were nice gentlemen, fond of Brother Carolus Robert still. This helped Egan's heart.

He'd come to sweep the church and check the space heaters and radiators because the cold was on. But he would preach if any showed. The rain chill lay in him still. The heaters were old donated units, probably illegal. The clay grates red with heat. They ran off a propane tank behind the little church. He liked them because you saw immediate hell in them. Hell was loose in the world and it had its colors. Beings came up from its reaches in a reverse resurrection and got among what righteous flocks remained.

He knew he had no more life span than a dog's left to him, and his face might ruin his chances for marriage, but he would bring a righteous posse into this fight, beginning tonight with even one sheep. These bones were merely death, reminders there was only one road and the road never changed. They were only the last litter of life. Perhaps his methedrine run seven years back was meant to show him this. Here they were where they belonged. He might preach about them. Or lacquer them for display in the chapel, carrying them with him to his other ministries. He did not quite understand yet his duty to them, but on the other hand he had not known what day would follow the next since he surrendered himself to the Lord Jesus Christ.