Yonder Stands Your Orphan (23 page)

Melanie and Facetto. Love and despair go hand in hand. Sleep in the same bed. In full light she was not confident of herself, but she could not know Facetto was gone in love for her much deeper than appearances. The love was ruining him, he slept with her soul and never got enough of it.
What lines bred Melanie? They ought to store the blood in a safe.
He was twice in love with her just for lasting.

She studied the large bent dog. Its face made her think of T. S. Eliot's famous line, “some infinitely gentle, / infinitely suffering thing.” It was an emeritus of the tracks in West Memphis, where Deputy Bernard had confiscated it from a man who had abused it. For Facetto, the greyhound stood for something. What else could comfort this startling creature better than another startling creature, with eyes haunted as if alarmed by its own creation. He gave it to be there in his absence from her.

“When I come back, I want you to've named our dog. We don't know it. You'll be at the door of your house and tell me the name, and then drop your gown and I'll get on my knees.”

“Sweet man.”

He thought he knew his killer now and cutter too. It was long quiet work, but he would have him soon. Bernard had seen something and a church trombonist had seen something. But Facetto's memory of their last acts was driving him
around the bend, riding his Melanie to the tune of “Sorcerer's Apprentice” on the stereo in the next room. She was taken by several supreme moments, a happy crisis she did not know as a possibility. She was sad after the outflow and wept deeply in gratitude. He said he needed to bring her home good news and wouldn't return until he did. Then he was gone.

Melanie was very weary of what regular people thought. Their thoughts began to hurt and make her weak.
Come let me be your grandmother harlot or whatever it is I'm called. Let me be the source of dissension. I never knew Ben Harvard loved me. But fine, fine—let me serve as not only sin but evil around here. I meant to be a scandal all along. Add me to all the hauntings and chaos and lunacy. I am so tired of these old jaws cracking about it.
She went back into the house.

For his own pain, Dr. Harvard decided to come down to the pier and see Melanie by accident in his mission of concern about Ulrich and Feeney at large on the barge. Others had gathered when word got out they might be in trouble or lost. Wren, Lewis, the dog Son, who frightened the greyhound back indoors, John Roman and the pale and butchered Egan gathered at the end of the pier. Then Sidney dragged down from his bait-store duties, making a show of anger about his lost trade. Nobody remembered who'd called him. He was off on a mad consumer's ride, a revenge against lost time and missed women, fun, dice, fine liquor. His language was tougher, glibber than his old talk. Nobody knew quite who he was now. He emulated Man Mortimer, who was changing gravely himself.

They could see tiny specks of life across the lake but no boat. They spoke of the boat as if it were at the bottom of the lake and the old men bobbing and yammering in their life jackets. And what each had planned to read next meditation way up the reservoir near Yazoo—the Indian word
for death ghost, was it? Sidney reminded Harvard of all the artistic and nautical effort he had put in the project, forget the pile of money, which nobody else here had, combined.

“All for Miss Melanie too. We know that. A grand boat for a grand swank love, wasn't it? And your poor wife dying at home all the while, smoking them cigarettes and building up her sad neglected ass with chocolate.”

“You are scum,” said Harvard.

All agreed the sheriff was a strange do-nothing about these troubles. That he was just another fraud of vocality like Bill Clinton. The law was fast cars with whip antennae racing around from one unsolved atrocity to another, screaming radios. Shield on the door ought to read
Late, Lard-ass, Last to Know
. But expert marksmen on small dogs ruffing in a driveway, or puffed actors in dinner theater, a fit of exhibitionism. Your taxes at work.

Then they spoke of Melanie. “There'll come the day when it's right, Harvard. You'll propose marriage, she'll accept. The two of you were made for each other. Get married on the barge by Parson Egan here,” Lewis said.

Egan watched the water east and west. He had not uttered a word, and he was ashamed of his carved face, the cross in stitched pieces.

“If you don't care old sheriff boy been a-tappin it,” said Sidney happily.

“Please.” Harvard had found his own small voice at last.

“The two of 'em come 'round, why you can smell it on 'em,” Sidney insisted.

“You're a wretched man, if not evil,” cried tall Lewis.

“Not no worse than the truth. Yeah, she got her glass animals and her books and music and now her lawman. She a complete woman.”

Harvard turned and walked up the hill, in grief, they presumed.

John Roman was about to reveal Sidney's late career between the whores. He liked and admired Harvard tremendously. But then Wren spoke again, hopeful that the lying he had done about Wake Island was forgotten.

“You had to move your mouth and break the best heart here!”

He stepped forward and slapped Sidney across the face. His arm was long and he still had surprising power in it. It was not an idle blow. Sidney sat right down on the beach grass. It seemed Wren was not through, and John Roman moved up to restrain him. But you thought he might be wanting a piece of Sidney too. Everybody did.

Sidney, huddled down, delirious in spite, was glad to see that in their unhappiness the others now turned on each other. John Roman got Wren in a half nelson and started dragging him away from Sidney. Lewis kicked at Sidney's face, missed, came again. Sidney took a blow right into the heaving place and began rolling and firing projectile vomit. Got some on the poor stitched Frankensteinish Byron Egan, who was attempting to intervene. Son pranced around, barking and wagging his tail. Across the lake they heard at an immense distance what sounded like serial gunfire and turned. All this while, Egan, silent about his attacker, pleaded for the flock to return to itself.

Ulrich and Feeney approached the pier and slowed, observing the etiquette of the small wake. They were doing fine, nothing going over had been senile or forgetful. It was just that Ulrich was relying on Feeney for a bit of navigation and Feeney didn't see right, nor did he acknowledge this to himself, so he had taken them out of their way a bit. Now he
thought he saw a sail come up on the pier, and a boat, hoisted by its small crew. What was happening was that armed children were making a barricade on the end of their pier at the behest of the camp founders, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor.

The couple was armed too. They did not expect the oncoming barge to be armed, but they guessed Mortimer might be aboard and intended to deliver a volley that would part the man fifteen ways.

They had made a flag, orange, black and white, with the letters OASS in black. They called themselves Oasis,
Orphans Against Smiling Strangers.
A slogan stitched on it:

WE HAVE ALREADY LOST, SO WE WILL WIN
WE SHALL LOSE MANY, WE SHALL KILL FEW
THE ONE WE KILL, SMILING STRANGER,
WILL BE YOU.

The changes were inspired by the awful revelations of the fifteen-year-old girls. Man Mortimer thought he had charmed them and sent them back to recruit fresher younger subjects for his new video company. But Sandra, the littler one, had been injured by Large Lloyd, who had grown angry and impatient in his work and felt ludicrous in a cape and mask. They intended to kill Mortimer, and Lloyd too. And Edie, Bertha and especially Marcine, who was hardly older than the camp girls and helped betray them. Both ruined for life by intimacies distributed widely as underground art.

Minny and Sandra had turned on Mortimer when he explained over the telephone, with compassion and sweetness, he thought, that they were too old now for his projects. One day, he promised, he would take them away and set them up in fine style. But day after day, Mortimer failed to show. Then came the day when they exposed him for what
he was. They did not say how glad they had been to participate, but they mentioned drugs, blackmail and death threats that had never occurred. Gene and Penny were in violent sympathy with hurt children. A new spirit took over. They would not assassinate outside the camp fence, but anybody from outside who entered the grounds, well, the new spirit was on the end of the pier behind a canoe. They began to string razor wire from the cab of a pickup, but several were cut and the going was slow. They glued glass onto percussion grenades with Krazy Glue. Many a little one glued the grenade to his palm too. No discussion. No trust in the laws of men. Death to smiling strangers on the spot. Death by long-overdue Higher Law.

Both girls now knelt behind the canoe barricade with seven others, all taking aim not on the man in the wheel-house but on the one standing and trying to unblur his impressions, Carl Bob Feeney. Minny, the girl with breasts, had the honor of handling a Winchester lever-action .30/.30 with hollowpoint bullets. A telescope for sighting. She had known for a long time that Mortimer was not aboard, but Feeney looked a good deal like her second stepfather in Galveston, Texas.

Ulrich performed a slow turn about fifty yards out in a hail of lead. The pleasure boat was riddled, its wind-shield and stained-glass cabin windows shattered. Only the ineptness of the orphans' rifle training was on their side. Outside of real estate, the Ten Hoors had no talents, though they presumed to emit rays of instruction by simply riding horses and setting a good example. Minny fired over and over at Feeney through the telescope and must have carved his outline in blue space around him. Somebody threw two grenades. Thumping, pumping geysers and minnow kill out of twelve feet of clear green water. The barge was on the way
back at full throttle. Twin Mercuries churning all-out. Ulrich must have caught up to the point where most of the bullets and buckshot were going in their error, for the back of the right stern disappeared and smoke crept up.

After a year, it felt to Feeney and Ulrich, they were out of range. In another place and time they would have been commended to some award. Soon they were pretty well afire back there but making good time to Farté Cove. The Ten Hoors stood arm in arm behind the firing line, hating the vehicle that might have brought another Man Mortimer to their shores. An armed Carl Bob Feeney would have shot down the both of them.

The Oasis flag still flew on its pole at the front of the barricade. The couple considered this a victory, and they celebrated with hot dogs and a long movie that night. Outside, older orphans patrolled the fence and beefed-up sections of unrolled barbed wire. Rifles slung on a rope across their backs. They gathered around the campfire for chats. An unwise salvo, bad military instruction. But there had been army error everywhere. A tradition carried on apace.

The pier crowd watched as Ulrich brought the barge over across the lake. There was a fire in the stern near the gas tanks. Saner men would have jumped overboard five minutes ago, but not these pilgrims. They plowed, they felt the power drop back to a single Mercury, they felt orange and hot on their backs. One of the tanks seemed a wall of flames and threatened to explode the next tank.
It will blow, it will immolate, it will soon be over
, Ulrich thought.
Not a bad thing, as I am ready to go to the dead animals in that other world and spend my next life atoning. Carl Bob Feeney alongside. This is the hell never described, where you get a second chance to correct your miserable life by daily ministry to those you harmed or made
dead. Perhaps these are the reincarnated ones, the saints we still have scattered among us. Hitler and Stalin working as good men in obscurity somewhere. And Mao, who never took a bath except in the organs of his young lovers, as he put it, and who murdered even the sparrows of the air to bring a pestilence of grasshoppers. Feeney and I will recognize them, workers in the vineyard
.

Feeney would have been long gone in his double life jacket except he feared water so much and thought it capable of melting off the buckles. All deeper water to Feeney was a sucking vortex activated by contact with any warm thing that thrashed. Then there were the sharks. Great fat blond lake sharks that lay on the bottom until stirred by that music above, men flapping, kicking their legs, yelling for help.

“We'll have to run her aground near the pier and call for help,” said Ulrich.

“Friend, there is no help here. Try to make the shallows out of the shark beds.”

“Feeney, you're an old priest from Ireland. There are no sharks. Leave it to me. I know nature!” This was a lie.

All considered
, Feeney thought,
those children blazing away were very charitable. They might have killed us easily instead of this warning. We could have been the church, the state or landlords. Preachers and destroyers
.

They neared the pier, jumped down from a fully engulfed floor of the bow and cabin. The pleasure barge was a collapsed charcoal hulk by the time Melanie got the Redwood fire department there. No obvious evidence of foul play, only the vague idiocy of two old fools. Ulrich and Feeney never mentioned they were fired upon and took the abuse with equanimity.

Nevertheless, sane fishermen avoided fishing the weeds and lily pads of the orphans' camp shoreline. All that rifle range going, you might get into something stray.

Sidney was back at the bait store when he got word and almost wrecked his fine car several times racing over, wallowing on gravel and twisting on grass, fishtailing. With water on the road he would have hydroplaned. Then he limped wildly down the hill where others gathered. Ulrich had done this trying to light a cigarette aft, near the gasoline, he was told. One more chance before they hauled him and Feeney to Almost There. Sidney Farté was in ecstasy.

Sheriff Facetto had a lead. The last to see Pepper alive seemed to have been Ruthna, a somewhat notorious woman, and two men called Harb and Alexander. The sheriff had tracked them to the tame and brick-streeted town of Clinton, where the Baptist college was, and where Grant had once stabled his horses in a chapel in the midst of giant cedars. Now its suburbs defined it. Pine forests ripped down for the blocky bunkers of new businessmen and computer Christians fleeing the blacker Jackson to the east.