Yonder Stands Your Orphan (19 page)

It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.

Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.

Roman resembled his grandfather on his mother's side, a man struck blind by a train in his sixties. The old man sat in the chair grinning. Roman couldn't recall a whine or complaint from him. As if he had crashed up safe somewhere, the water of an ocean bathing his feet. You would go to him for a memory and he spoke it.

Melanie was a fine lady but didn't have enough stories in her, ones of her own. She borrowed from him. This was not so much too late as just impossible. If you couldn't sit without stirring into somebody else's life at age seventy-two, you had either bad stories or too few of them. When you had too few stories, you went mad. When you had only one, they took you away to the asylum until you got more.

The army had been a long mistake, but he could let that go. Somebody must be there as the platoon's old animal and it was him. Sergeant major, watching West Point, Virginia Military and Citadel killed over and over. He regretted he was not a singing jazz-trumpet man like Chet Baker, but somebody had to be there regretting too. The army would rise up and grab you because it was vacant. You went to it young when even an army barracks was something fresh. The place filled you, or the unplace of it. Then you got wise enough to live. Others came close to you wanting to live also.

Roman hooked into something large and squirming. All his evenings contracted into this sweet emergency. Muscles underwater struggling against your arms, the line alive down to your belly and the butt of the new rod, Shakespeare the brand, answering. It had to be a cat, very big. As clear a gift as anything in the world. If he were a preacher, he would say that fish was God's mercy. You never got closer to it than above the water for a long, long time. Here, bringing it home like a lost friend.

When he was young he cursed fish as he pulled them in. He no longer did. That was evil, stupid, greedy. Should lose your thumbs for it. For your mean and larcenous spirit. Now he loved this fishing peace above all things. He had not once been let down, even when nothing came home for him. The stories inside had been better over green water.

At the mouth of another cove near the bad restaurant, the one that he called Gristle and Sons with Cold Beer, he saw a pale-faced but arm- and shoulder-burned cracker bounced up and wallowing on a Jet Ski, a horrible and noi-some bully of a water motorcycle built in spite for the northern snowmobile, on which other punks roared and beheaded themselves on fence wire. The boy was doing about fifty over Roman's quiet water. The wash from the machine was immense into the shallows, whipping water weeds and terrifying minnows and young bass toward Roman. The big catfish rolled in behind this local storm. Roman cursed the ski and saluted this bully. Old whiskered heavyweight at last snatched from its appetites.
At last we meet
. It was too big to be succulent, and he was glad to let it go after petting it.

When he turned to the lake again and threw his nightcrawlers and light sinker toward a stranded bough on a black strip of deep, he hoped he would not see another living soul, and he didn't. Heard only the distant nagging whine of the ski.

The cracker Sponce was on the far side of the lake, seeking other audiences. A mad Protestant in a cathedral too green and black and silent for him, bent on fouling these spaces with the great
I am
.

THE COYOTE WAS IN HER COTTAGE BACKYARD SINGING
to the edges of the swamp. She was naked in her solitude with nature. She sometimes saw deer and raccoon coming up to hear. And a thickage of squirrels, red and fox and gray. She saw mistletoe high on a dead post-oak limb and wanted it for her hair. She hated guns, but Raymond shot the mistletoe down for her with his newly confessed Mossberg. Now she had it in the hair above her ear.

The Coyote was much like John Roman. The young should have been seeking her instruction, but it was Raymond after her, and sometimes hard, wanting evermore an answer to her easy talents, her simple life. Still doing homework for his soul in his forties. His nervous dissertation.

He was a late-blooming prodigy on the saxophone. She could not read music much but she knew. Grant him that, even though he bought the band and managed it toward himself almost unintentionally. He had somehow gotten good through pure want. Triumph of his burnt doctor's will. It was a puzzle why he played certain needy and vicious ways, or would even want to, like a tomcat dragging away from a long fight down an alley. Imprecations, hisses, mewlings, threats. Why develop this style when there were so many others?

They put something called a jellyball in horses' stables to give them something to do. Or they put chickens, goats or radios in their stalls to be their friends, or a Jack Russell terrier. Otherwise they would get bored and kick themselves lame. Hurt others, bite. Maybe she was Raymond's jellyball. And he needed another too, his talking saxophone. But who
would not? Standing alone drives most mad in a single week. Look at Castro's and Stalin's prisoners. Mimi was on the right, happily and with great health. Her talent was committed on the day the Iron Curtain fell. She felt new lightness in her voice, the old gray seriousness with its laws left her. Her dispossessed grandparents were mocked in Havana for once having money and an ink factory. She could spit twenty feet across the room into the eye of a communist.

She was needing Raymond less and this would go on, but she loved him. They could walk together like a pair of face cards. It did not frighten her that their love was sometimes dead. It would come back and surprise you. She was fierce for loyalty.

Now she parted the limbs of the wild magnolia and froze at the sight of two skeletons sitting in the soil watching her. She did not hear the six males whispering not far behind them. Ulrich, Jacob, Isaac, Sponce, Carl Bob Feeney, his nephew Egan. Choir of voyeurs? Hunters? Lake idiots? They could be tourists spying on this cottage haunted by its terrors and chaos. Rude bastards. Where was the woman nailed to the wall? Where did the graveyard witch sleep?

She gave a yelp for Raymond and shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw every male coming forward through holly hedges and giant ferns to assure her with their kindest apologies. Hurt on their faces. Max Raymond now right behind her with the stupid mistletoe rifle. Everything absurd was borne by this ministry, like a strange rural basketball team that had lost its ball. The skeletons smelled too.

“I love you,” said small Jacob.

Mimi screamed again, but with less power.

“Lady, we ain't—” Jacob was paralyzed by her scream and jumped backwards into some vines, struggling, feet tangled.

“We're sorry we seen you naked.”

Not us,
the adults thought together.

“We tried not to look.”

“I don't care whether the children. . . . Who are you?”

She lowered herself before the two boys now standing together. She would not look at the skeletons. When Raymond saw them, he chambered a round. The skulls with their stunned hilarity. Arms resting on the soil. Now the wiring job obvious, coat hangers. Done with pliers. This was the empty swamp she had been singing to without knowing. All this lively rot. Mimi went back to the cottage and grabbed her robe off the porch rail.

“We don't know,” said Egan. “These bones have nothing to do with any of us. The boys put them together with wire. I'm a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ.” She'd already heard from Raymond about the tattoo of the cross on the man's cheek.

“Were you hunched down here listening to me or waiting for me to have a heart attack when I saw these dead bodies?”

“Please, lady. We meant good.”

“They did. They told me,” said Sponce. He was seeking the level of maturity, at least to that of Egan of the cross and gray ponytail. At least a trustable ass.

“We sharing these folks, but they ain't ours. The sheriff can call up north and get us a reward,” said small Jacob.

“That's not a good idea, little boy,” said Egan. He had been sweating mightily even before this conversation.

The boys now hunkered. She could barely perceive they were waddling toward her. Raymond shared lust for vision with the eldest, Ulrich. She saw they were fascinated by her black curls. Her Cuban Florida face. They wore her shirts, but she didn't notice. Blanched coffee beans with faces
on them, these boys. No Indian or black. Small earnest Ulstermen looking for a mother and her music.

She began singing, incredibly, facing away from them all but facing Max Raymond and his weapon, lowered. The song was about a baby, the mountain and the sea. She sang it quietly, but there were high notes that made the boys quiver. At the end Jacob reached over to touch her wrist. She held his hand. The three of them walked toward her kitchen. Isaac and Sponce knew they weren't meant to follow.

She had become used to the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.

She had once sung a song taken from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.

Summer grasses,

Where soldiers dreamed.

Now she sang that one to her new swamp acolytes, rapt twice over for being nearly in her face. She sat on the back steps after feeding them ham and Gouda on French bread with mayonnaise and a tall bottle of orange soda pop. Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash. Sister singing away the last days of her youth.

Raymond had gone back inside and was sleeping. The preacher Egan had hung around for a reason unclear to her. He went back and forth to and through the border of tree arches, unseen at the foot of the swamp.

Raymond suddenly knew it was time to return to the bad restaurant and then his ache for visions would be satisfied.
The bad restaurant would stay when only zombies prevailed. It served food for the dead, tired fishermen and humble vacationers worsened the instant they sat down and had the bad water. Thousands like it at state lines, watering holes in the great western deserts, far-flung Idaho and Maine. Their owners say, “We just couldn't help it, we were food people. We never said good food people.”

Raymond was in the pawnshop looking at a delightful saxophone and about to buy it when the feeling hit him. What he would see and be transformed by was right next door to his own cottage, not out in the fars, the wides, the bars or churches. He put the saxophone down and within seconds saw a shadow pass the shop. It was a man hobbling and slurring the few words he could manage, and Raymond was positive it was Mimi's old ex, what was left of him after the suicide attempt in Vicksburg, rolling and pitching up Market and the pawns to find Raymond. He went out to the walk and saw nothing but a red car leaving, and he followed it in his own. Mimi was in Miami singing with another band for a couple of weeks. He was alone. He knew this was right. He had not eaten for two days, for no good reason. The moment was pressing.

A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of this saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces ahead into
otherness
. Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.

Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession
, thought Raymond, following the red car.
Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound.
They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another
. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstands imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.

The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its
RESTAURANT
sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that.
Refill that beige for you, sir?
Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war.

Because as Mimi Suarez's grandfather said,
When you eat well, you are eating memory
. But here for a few cents less, you could eat no life at all. You could eat as much history as just ended in the kitchen, cooked in spite at great speed by an inmate of dead dreams. A sort of hospital food with more dread in it.

Oh yes, mambo, salsa, shake that tree, bitch, let them coconuts of yours fall down
. Max Raymond heard the man in the crowd watching Mimi in Miami right then. Each heavy command resounded in his head. He'd never experienced anything like this before.

The red car was indeed heading for the lake, through Redwood, the low fields and waters. Grim bluster of new black clouds in the west. This was storm country. Vicksburg, 1959, a tornado came through, tore out half the town, created new lakes, killed scores. He watched breaths circle a lawn, lifting the leaves of a collapsed muscadine arbor. The smell somewhere as if lightning had opened a melon, electrified sperm. He thought of the hot grease pitched on the honeysuckle by a zombie of the restaurant's kitchen. In a meadow he caught a wave of dead-fish smell. Oh, the Onward cemetery. Called
There Now
. Har.