Yonder Stands Your Orphan (4 page)

It was just seven years ago Egan had been the driver who felt silent forms in the car seats beside him wanting to scream and party. When the car went under, he loved even the sweat on his brow. Done. The Christian antiapotheosis.
Now
, he said,
let's really get wasted, brother monkeys. Mister Me, I be dead
.

Two days later a deputation arrived at the body shop in Redwood. Dr. Harvard and Melanie Wooten in the front seat of her station wagon. The culprit Ulrich in the back, hangdog. Behind them they towed the ATV, dinged up and muddy. It was not Ulrich's only misadventure with a local machine. Two years ago he had bought a used Jet Ski and had gone airborne with it on the other side of the cove. Went out of the lake and pile-drove into blackberry bushes and wild vicious yucca plants. The steering column had driven his scrotum upwards into some unprepared cavity, and the yucca spears had entered his thighs and stomach very deeply before he rolled off into the lesser crucifixion of blackberry thorns. He could not recall what he was trying to prove. Perhaps atonement for the maimed pilot in Huntsville. Or all of his life after the war.

Melanie came out to the body man, Ronny, who was waiting with the same rubber hammer, and with Percy and Marcine too. They had squabbled but returned because there was nowhere else in Redwood to gather. Marcine was much taken with Melanie, who was elegant and lovely, but in a natural way that would have suited any outfit. Marcine was not aware there were any women in this county, young or older, like Melanie. And the older woman did work her
charm, as the dignified Harvard leaned on the car hood smoking a pipe, her ally.

Melanie explained that Ulrich was very sorry, he was a sick old fellow with rare convictions. He had brought money to take care of the broken vehicle and the rifle. He had little money left. She felt he had been punished. Now he needed his woody and his walker back. The body man stood aside as if there was no more discussion, Percy took the money, and Ulrich struggled from the rear seat offering his hand but looking at the pavement. Percy agreed. He did not even ask about the deer, had forgotten it.

“Thank you ever so much,” Melanie said as the body man handed over the keys to Ulrich. “You are very human and forgiving.” She smiled at Marcine. “And lovely.” Marcine had tamer, modest hair now, and wore only lipstick, mid-heeled white shoes.

They drove away in the two cars, and Marcine watched, a startled worship still on her face.

Next afternoon, she pouted, then went to the home of Ronny the body man's aunt, who worked for this man in Vicksburg at a kind of car agency. The aunt dressed well and seemed to have no worries, had a thirty-five-inch Sanyo television with Direct Digital TV system and a brick house.

“What is the name of the man you work for in Vicksburg, Bertha?”

“The man is
Man
.”

“What?”

“His name is Man Mortimer. Hard, but a teddy bear. If you know him.”

“You look to be doing fine.”

“Oh, they is opportunities up there. If you get in, all you have to do is one main deal.”

“What's that?”

“Forget everything. You going to rise, you gonna love forgetting you ever had a memory. I recommend it. You know there's no world with that pissant nephew of mine. You'll remember every day till when you cut your own heart out with a knife.”

“I heard that.”

When her husband Wootie died, Melanie stayed on the lake in their rambling vacation house. She was seventy-one years old and wished she were a poet. But she was too direct for that, her senses too good, her memory too precise, and she couldn't drink much.

She loved the egrets, the cranes, the herons, and in the evening the bullfrogs singing around the cove in their squat ardor. She was a pretty old woman, and her husband, a college president, had been very grateful. Theirs was a kind marriage without much fever, and in his sixties Wootie began falling in love with boy students and writing them letters. He was fired. This did not confuse Melanie's esteem for him. She stuck with him until he died in this house on the lake where he had fled in terminal depression. They had friends among the old men who spent their days on the pier.

She was an artisan who blew glass animals in a rear part of the house and sold them at the bait house in the crossroads of the lake and Vicksburg highways. She had living money and did not need to do this, but she had never honestly known the world of men and intended to have contact with it. The women she had known were trivial and glum academic wives. Without hate she withdrew from them. She also cheered the old at the Onward nursing home and gave away her animals there. She organized speakers and entertainments for them. She would sometimes visit the casino in Vicksburg all alone, not to gamble but because she relished
the musicians. Men thought she was in her late forties, most likely, and some wondered if her elegance indicated a high-class prostitute of some sort. But she had a poise about her that kept them polite and even a little scared, because they assumed she must be connected to a powerful man not of these parts.

She watched from her windows. She watched for men like a teenager. She watched for wildlife like a child. One day she saw an eagle fishing. Another day she saw an armadillo mother playing with her children.

She liked a big-stomached black fellow who sat on a white lard bucket fishing a lesser inlet of the big cove with a cane pole. He was quiet until a fish was on, and then she would hear him talking to it. Sometimes he whooped as if rolling down the aisle in a church. He was engaged. Otherwise he ate his boiled meat, rat cheese and saltines with a cold tall can of beer from the ice of his other lard bucket, then slept whole half hours on top of the lard bucket in the shade of the willows and cypresses.

This man was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Melanie had seen him in Redwood one Veterans' Day. His name was John Roman, and he was proud of the Indian in his blood and adored his wife, Bernice, who looked even more Indian than he did. On his last tour he was shot three times, twice through the shoulder and once through the mouth, in a cane field at twilight. He was heavy even then and bore it well. He listened to Chet Baker on the tape deck over and over when he was in the hospital. He belonged to the world of smoky old jazz clubs and wanted fervently to return to it. He loved how this white man held his tones with an old sincerity, even when he was lacking teeth. He felt allied to Baker because now he too had missing teeth from the gunshot through his jaw. “My Funny Valentine.” Never
enough of that. He was planning to sing like that himself when he got back to Bernice in Mississippi. He would struggle for the tone as the injured Chet Baker did. He sang with a whistle from the side of his mouth. He went to San Diego, Houston, New Orleans, then Jackson, Mississippi, where she waited in the airport.

She put her finger in the dimple where his cheek had sunk to the gap. “What you gonna do now, old soldier?”

“Wear out my ass. Wear sandals.” White was on top of his hair.

He wasn't just coming home. He was making a home, and his ass was going to be nailed to it. They bought a Walter home on stilts near a pleasant green bayou a hundred yards from the reservoir road. The home was made to collapse about the time he and Bernice died together. Passersby could barely imagine the exquisite joy inside this meek home. John Roman himself could hardly believe his pleasure when he touched the front doorknob of this, his own settlement.

Melanie watched him and wondered why he had fought. For this home?

Last week a rain had come on suddenly and so white that her mind reflected to another rain in Caw, Texas, in the thirties, when she was a child. She was on the esplanade in front of the hardware store waiting for her father, a cattleman and well digger, inside. She was abruptly frightened by a white rain out of earthquake thunder, a rain of such density she could not discern buildings across the street. She looked five minutes into a writhing blanket of it and believed she saw forms go over, arms of darker frantic air. She had not seen a rain like this since, until last week on the cove when she was watching the heavy black man fishing from his bucket. She could not make him out in the downpour and thought it was because he was not there, was someplace dry. Yet when the
rain dispersed, the man still sat holding his cane pole in the mist. He was drenched and he was singing. His motorbike lay in a puddle, knocked over by the storm.

It was a feat how he balanced his buckets and pole on the skinny machine. Big sandaled feet banked on either peg like underwings. The fish were in wire baskets saddled across the fender behind him.

She wanted to be his friend but was not sure how to go about it.

When you take someone for a friend, you feel you owe him something, she decided. You have owed him far back into unconscious time and will spend the rest of your days giving to him. The man brought tears to her eyes. White hair and wearing overalls, unconscious of her. She watched him pour Stanback powder into a Pepsi one afternoon. Then he drank it down in one draft. She wondered if he was a saint. If he had served a larger power without whimpering these years while she had served almost nothing but civility. Her parties among the chattering phlegmatists of the campus. Driven from fecklessness to symbols.
And yourself
, she thought in her nainsook,
you want him to be Uncle Remus goes to war, then the old happy fishing patriot. Who am I, old as he is and more? I might be an advanced case of local poet. A trivial and obvious woman, alone
. She wrote nothing.

Melanie had not seen many white men having fun or even smiling in Caw, a town thickly grim even by Texas depression standards. Most were Christian, but their music was dirges and they would rather nod than talk. Once musicians came to town in a dusty Airstream trailer towed by a Mercury. They did not mean to stop here, but they had no money for gas to move on westward, perhaps to Auburn, where one of them had an aunt of substance. They set up in the street and began to play.

One of them was a Negro who played trombone, a man of some girth like the present John Roman. He was not young but still had the face of a boy in his jowls. He wore spectacles. Nobody had seen anything like this. The man was from Galveston, dark as French coffee. Four men gathered around the front of the band, peering directly at the chubby Negro. Melanie was uncertain whether they intended to harm the dark man or were mesmerized by him. They were unschooled in an audience's relationship to a band, these weathered white men in gabardine pants or overalls and each with a felt George Raft hat the color of lead with sunspots and sweat lines on the crown. They stood right in the faces of the reed players on their folding chairs, planted almost in the band itself.

The sun made perfect high noon. This was no time to hear jazz, this Tuesday. Nor was any a good day in this part of Texas, she supposed, staring at John Roman asleep on his lard bucket.

The Negro trombonist might have been playing for his life. He set his horn and face, that face of a happy boy in rims of flesh, and never closed his eyes, as she saw other horn men do in later days. She knew one of the white men was a Baptist preacher who'd once ordered an unrepentant man's death as he sat drunk and cursing in bedroom slippers with his sex loose under a vomitous white shirt. One of the assassins his brother.

In the street before the one-room school, students of all heights stood at the window for a sight of the band. The bandsmen were unaware of interrupting school, and Melanie did not know whether the white men cared. The band kept playing, an open suitcase on the ground before them where folks might toss coins, but three tunes and none had dropped a penny. Urchins stood behind the legs of the
men. The black man began getting happier and happier in the face around the big mouthpiece. He was the soloist often, with only bass fiddle and drums and tinkling piano nursing the silences.

Grown children now stood behind the others, and a little Chinese-Cajun man in a straw hat with an ethereal crown carried a bucket of water to the survivors of the music. A carpenter began nailing and sawing on planks across saw-horses at the hardware door four buildings northward. The hammer popped squarely like shots. The carpenter was good, off in his own dream. Then the Negro began to shuffle and dance during the trumpet solo. The dust rose around his polished brogans, his brown ankles went pigeon-toed and duck-footed, without hosiery.

The bell of the trombone seemed to Melanie like a cave for an elf city. The man worked the plunger with violence and trembling. He danced and danced and then played with the rest toward the end and they desisted.

The carpenter was walking rapidly to the band, urging himself through the crowd. He held a hinged-lid trunk clean-squared, nail heads sunk smoothly, an artifact of instant cabinetry. He knelt to remove the open suitcase and lock it. Then he put the trunk in its place, drawing the lid back. “So as not to get your luggage dirty,” he said to the bandleader, whose hands had left his accordion as if to prevent blows on his person.

Then the rain of coins into the box began. The weathered men backed away. The spectacled boy in the face of the fat black man had never stopped smiling. Melanie dropped in her dime. She understood the man had saved his own life and her eyes grew wet in love for him. His music, the boy in the man's face, his peril.

Returned to our world, the next day she saw an eagle eating a gar carcass where John Roman had sat.

Wootie had been nearly a saint until the last, she thought. Goodness would wear you down too, God knows. You needed to see a bit of hell now and then. That and great joy. Would she ever have them? It seemed goodness was eroding her now, driving her into something flat and simple-headed.

At the bottom of her lawn was the pier. Old men gathered there, working on a sort of great cruising porch, a pleasure barge, under the supervision of Dr. Harvard. Dr. Harvard loved Melanie with a dreadful love, although she did not know it. His own wife, Nita, had cancer, so this pleasure craft could not be for her. He said it was for them all, for mild adventures up the enormous reservoir and for good philosophy and conversation, but it was really for Melanie. He was white-haired with a face unlined, four years older than Melanie. They were pretty old people and seemed matched and destined for a couple. Although there was the wife, taking her time to pass on, and Harvard, an ex-surgeon heavy with honors and thick with dignity, who could not declare himself. He wore his honors lightly, but the love of Melanie was like a tow chain locked around his neck.