Yonder Stands Your Orphan (9 page)

Mortimer wanted to sing. He hurt so much and he knew it had only begun to grab him, but he wanted to sing. “This is
my
country,” he began. “Land of the free that I love or something.” The Coyote had quit singing entirely and they heard this patriotism, absurd, maybe drunken, around the table. He was nobody's friend here. But he knew things, felt them. He knew he had been born without a talent for love. He was not ashamed.

You take for starters those orphan girls with their light little neck chains, then you see chains just a little bigger around their wrists, ankles, down their crease. Fairyland bondage, like. Mrs. Wooten and Dee come over to them to explain about being women, easing off their garments, dropping their own, cheerful! Then Large Lloyd enters to prove it to both ladies while the girls watch. Edie in something red and wearing long earrings, and she bathes Lloyd with her tongue. Because she is an older woman too, maybe a widow in the middle of being a mature love acrobat when her husband fell off a barge, and she's been innocently storing all this up
.

The girls keep being astounded. Dee Allison will then satisfy three men at once and then laugh as they shrink out of her. Mrs. Wooten and the silver-haired black woman, Roman's wife, cheering them on with some old island sex lore
.

They take their own pleasure, otherwise it's all queered. The whole thing is about female power, the man is just a friend to it. That's why the pope and the hair evangelists hate it. It's about Onan, careless with his seed. It's against populating the grimy little flybit species except for them as can appreciate time and flesh and imagination. It's about your high school play and sport and it don't speak to nothing but itself. You can't tell me who's harmed by it. The Internet is okay, but you develop there a lonely murderous kind of nerd who wears a raincoat in his own den, stepping out into the ether thinking it's real, realer than Mom, who he's hammered to death because she wasn't some Power Ranger with tits who makes waffles every day
.

These people ain't the ones to get me to the hospital, though. Bad choice. Whoa Lloyd, whoa Edie! Come here, get us on out here down the road to Warren General. I've done excited myself. That wasn't the way to go
. He rose gingerly and picked his way through to the casino, still patient as a new night watchman, as if he'd never coursed these alleys between the dings and the screaming, the magenta, teal and garnet rugs. Glorified bus station crying havoc. The blackjackers, the seven-uppers and roulette bayers who would have worked the state carnivals in other days, with their Chesterfield growls, women and men.

He began to cry to himself. The pain. Amid the plurality of pawnshop loiterers, lumpen proles. Like his father's name, Lumpkin. Mortimer gambled, but he never liked it here, even when he won. Too many times he saw the revenants of his parents, yanking on the slot arms in wet-mouthed hopelessness.
Like outpatients. The fine family locked and loaded to force once more the steely arm of chance.

Mississippians were good folks. They gave more in charity than any in the nation. Their hospitality seemed to be state law, and some white folks and black had quite a lot of dough now. Despite their rear-march structures in schools, religion, teenage pregnancy, money and tooth decay, the state was receiving an influx of black families. In flight from the cold North, which had revealed its soul after a century of moral high ground as a paved jungle issuing forth a life nasty, brutish and short. They resettled all the old counties, yet the Delta, richer in soil than the Valley Nile, was poor and home to casinos since the early nineties.

But in these poor counties there was other charity, in the form of suicide, often by cop. The lost soul saying, “I cease bothering, sweep me out.” The river awaited nearby, as much death as life. Several hanged themselves in prison, in drunk tanks. One man slit his wrists in a Dumpster behind a Hardee's because the food was so bad and its black and white teenage staff did little but carry on a race war over its microphones. He left a note to this effect.

Then there was just the sorriness. Was it modern times? A Jackson policeman named McJordan shot two small pet dogs within two weeks. One was loose on its owner's land. The other fifteen-pounder, yapping in the policeman's driveway, he claimed was threatening his wife. Did he mean to announce that he was such scum that he must be annihilated by any dog-loving rifleman in this state? McJordan was found to be within the law. He was back on the force, armed. Even Mortimer wondered if the cop was something newborn from science, and Mortimer had no feeling for dogs. Large
Lloyd vowed to destroy McJordan, but he was intellectual and was taking his time planning the torture.

“What? What?” Mortimer suddenly shouted above all the noise, the croupiers, the money changers. He had been dreaming, was losing blood.

Just then Mortimer saw Egan the minister in the aisles and was about to pronounce him a hypocrite to his face until he saw the fellow's mission. Egan was in motorcycle boots, the keys to many churches and their basements on a ring at his belt. He was handing out business cards. Stared at Mortimer as he gave him one.

“You said in your sermon you know me. But Reverend, I think it's me that knows
you
.” It dawned on Mortimer, seeing Egan up close, that this boy had driven the car with the woman and her boy in the trunk. He did not know where it was driven, didn't want to know, but he loved to feel the kudzu, the cane, the palmettos, the lesser Amazon bracken, the pestholes, the bayous and the creekbeds and oxbows all around him here these seven years. To know her and her infanticide would stay in undergrowth, underwater or, surviving that, would have been eaten by good time and its best friend, decay. He decided right then that the schoolteacher in the trunk must have been a dyke.

He understood he was sane too for not hugging nature and mostly spitting at it, wishing more of it was a rug and smelled like new cars. He was satisfied that he had never caught a largemouth bass or even thrown at one. Just the way they said Elvis was proud of never writing a song.

“No, I know
you
!” said Egan very loudly. Mortimer was not aware of others in the casino.

“Egan my holiness,” he erupted as if with a thought roaring straight out of his gonads, lost in hurt. “There are near a million coyotes in this state. What the hell's
happening
?”
All this stuff with eyes was crawling around the bodies in the trunk. Or it might be in the ocean. This boy Egan, the good shepherd. Once beat up women.

“You're wicked all the way through,” Egan said. “Another day I'd already have jacked up a switchblade to your throat and you'd be forgetting you look like Conway Twitty.”

Mortimer understood from his own grimmer days that it was not good to beat up women you thought weakened by speed and heroin. He understood this the afternoon he hit an almost giant girl with superb legs, messed up on everything. He'd never heard of some of the chemicals, and this girl beat him mercilessly. She was pure girl but could look done for when really she had another whole tank left.

“It's Fabian, Fabian, boy,” he rallied.

“You might of once looked like Fabian. Not no more.”

This assertion made Mortimer angry. But then he felt sick over the whole night, and small. Very weak, with the pain of monsters. Maybe he was in adrenaline shock. His legs sought a ladder of escape where there was none.

He read the card in his hand quickly.

IF YOU ARE HERE YOU ARE IN TROUBLE
MANY HAVE DIED HERE, LOST FROM BOTH MOTHER
AND CHRIST OUR LORD JESUS.

THIS IS HELL, FRIEND.

LET ME TAKE YOU TOWARD A HAPPY WORLD.

The Byron Egan Ministries
In front of you as you stand.

Mortimer was filled with sorrow and pity, for this boy and for himself.

“I believe,” said Egan, “you are hurt, my man.” Gold teeth, the brown but graying ponytail. The black tattoo of the cross on his cheek.

“I
am
hurt, Egan. Would you take me to Warren General Hospital? Would you?”

“I came for no other purpose.”

Egan, not young anymore either, set a stack of his cards on the roulette table behind him.

They walked out and rose into Mortimer's behemoth Lincoln Navigator. Egan drove. Mortimer saw by the dash light that his car was very bloody on the seats, the carpet, even the visor where Booth had put the stiletto back. He asked Egan if he'd like him to put on a religious station. Egan said no. When he worked with evil, he worked with evil.

“Brother Egan.” Man Mortimer rethought this. “Little Cousin Egan, Byron Egan. I never had the time to be good. You understand me? Something pushed me. I never liked it, but something always pushed me. Like Elvis, Twitty, George Jones. I feel uglier than Jones right now. But let me tell you. You ever write any songs or a book?”

“No, friend. I don't believe in it.”

“Believe? Well you wouldn't, I guess. I just say to you, for me I'm happy I never wrote a song or any book. I did the world the grace of keeping my no-talent mouth shut and my fingers quiet.”

“The first good thing I know about you, whore trader that used to be Fabian. Books are a very mortal sin. Books are not wrote by the Christly. I got no idea why a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't
miss a single one of them. He is a Peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes. Especially those Christian ones that write about lawyers or accountants killing each other.”

“That's a sermon's sermon, boy. Well done. Drive on, my good man, drive on.”

DEE ALLISON'S SONS ISAAC AND JACOB WERE NINE AND TEN
, but they already wanted a car, and they planned to take some orphans from the camp on a ride within the year. The car appeared one afternoon in June standing dry out of a former deep bayou that disappeared in a sinkhole. The earth opens and water goes downward in five or six seconds and you have a hole where a pond was, or a service station. Florida, because of its vast underground riverine passages, is first in sinkholes, but in other states wet over long periods you will hear of trailer homes, and a few times fishermen blandly working a pool, suddenly disappearing and the soil gray as lunar earth within the week.

The Allison boys had found the car all bare in the hole yesterday, on the back edge of the insane Irish ex-priest's land, with one of the priest's dogs messing around it in high anxiety. The car seemed to be a vintage something none of them had seen in person, but it was a ton and a half of rust mange in a coupe shape when they found it. They very much wanted this for their teenage car, the boys, and their older brother, Sponce, who did not confess it. You had the sense you could chip it out like a hunk of ocher marble and release a beauty within.

Isaac and Jacob did not care who they stole from, and they were also used to obtaining things just by guileless asking. But Carl Bob Feeney was an unbound hermit anxious to fire on trespassers. He loved his Irishness, had always been lonesome, and he compared himself to the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett. He was given to
patrolling the woods, as at this moment, with a .22 Magnum rifle, along with his dogs. There were eight of them, pound dogs ill used by deer hunters who'd run them for a season and then deserted them. When Feeney found them, they were feral and starved and had battled coyotes much more sophisticated and swift. Now they were merely loud and always in trouble. Not so much treeing creatures or baying at the moon or pursuing trespassers as rediscovering one another, beasts they seemed never to have encountered on this baseball field–size domain before, and beginning blind fights all over again. Most dogs do not have much recall or shame about recent hostilities. These dogs appeared not to recall other dogs as a possibility.

Today the boys had brought Sponce and his friend Harold Laird, who had such a sick crush on their mother. He fixed engines, but his main vocation was waiting for her to turn up from work in Mortimer's gift, the Range Rover, used and hunter green, and emerge from it in her white stockings and wary boredom. Harold could fix anything to run, like Ulrich's lost Jet Ski, given a strong limb and a chain and another working vehicle. He would show them the ropes once the thing was started. He owned a rugged high-horsepower ATV that they all sat on now, soberly driving short distances with a good muffler so Feeney wouldn't hear them.

The ex-priest's ears were not that good, anyway, from alcohol and heavy-metal music. Soundgarden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, the forgotten Irish rappers House of Pain. He may have stolen from the collection plate to buy the vast stereo system of 150-wattage that he and his nephew Egan thoroughly enjoyed.

The late seventies and eighties brought on the music of the homicidal charge, a home war after the lost war of Vietnam. This is the land of Visigoths, Picts, Celts, Zulus,
Huns, Indians, Scots, Vikings and Tripoli corsairs, with many substrata of Mongols,
banditos
and racial marines in a polyglot of fierce challenges. The ex-priest himself had been chaplain to the marines in Korea and still believed them the toughest armed force in the history of the world. What other kind of music was inevitable for these people? The armed services know it is classical and employ it freely. And civilians, dressed in the GI-black T-shirt with something nasty printed on it, hair long behind, short at the sides, greasy blue jeans and jackboots tougher than anything they might wear them to do, which is mostly listening to heavy metal and imagining a horde assault against dance majors and carrying off their willing women on their shoulders. The little boys joined the ex-priest in this enthusiasm unknowingly. Harold had gotten them small T-shirts to match their long hair behind. One shirt read:
There's Shit in My Ear Were You Saying Something?
The other on the nine-year-old said:
If You Ain't a Hemorrhoid Get Off My Ass
. These shirts were made for car drivers.