Yonder Stands Your Orphan (5 page)

Among the other old was Sidney Farté, with his shingles and bitterness, in starched shirts so stiff they seemed to make the little man into a kite, whispering with curses, bouncing in agony from one breeze to the next. Ulrich carried on with his new emphysema. He wore floral shirts and had cut down to five enormous Benson & Hedges cigarettes a day. Tall Pete Wren and his dog, Son, remained the only earnest fishermen of the pier crowd. Wren a master bluegill fisherman with fly rod and a Wake Island prevaricator who
had borrowed the biography of his cousin and written a letter from a Private Martin Lewis testifying to his captain's heroism. The local VFA gave a ceremony in Vicksburg with great belated reverence until the actual hero Wren was rolled in, sad but not angry at the cousin he had not seen in years. Pete Wren was a colonel who had made his rank in the Oregon National Guard.

Melanie had seen the old man weeping for loneliness in the middle of the pier crowd one afternoon. This emotion did not surprise her, and she drove with Wren to get him a dog from the Vicksburg pound. Now, with Son, a furred brat needing all kinds of attention, Wren seemed better. Though the dog, an Australian cattle dog, was a neurotic bother who would dive underwater to retrieve a fishing lure. Sometimes Lewis and his bride, Moore, only seventy, came to paint or sand. They were both in chemo, but active and inseparable. Moore was always overdressed, like a creature of ancient television housewifery. She wore heels and a pearl necklace when she shopped in Vicksburg. She retained these habiliments when naked and mounted by old Lewis, and this fact somehow got out to the rest, but the couple were unashamed in this scandal. In fact, honored by it.

When Ulrich was told of the scandal, he blinked and seemed pained, showing teeth in a yanked smile of incomprehension. It was feared he was headed for a breakdown. Ulrich watched the dog Son constantly, always near tearbreak.

Among these denizens Melanie moved. Lean, clean beige skin, bowed lips. An elegance on loan from the cinema, they thought. She was frank, to the point, with a high brow under pulled-back white hair, a visage of permanent gravity. The men almost quit their lies when she appeared, and this disgusted Sidney Farté, who felt it squeezed him into a church pew. It had been the same with the near-saint
Wooten, her dead husband, such a clean little statesman who had rebuilt the cove pier and given it handsome rails. Sidney felt censored around him and was overjoyed to hear, after Wooten's death, that he had begun running queer in his last days at the Methodist college.

Sidney's old papa, Pepper, ran the bait store and was even nastier than Sidney, who waited on him to die. Sidney suspected both of them were born without a heart, but this did not alarm him. He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.

After a month's visit, his nephew from Yale had told him he was a poisonous old coot who ought to be ashamed of himself. This floored Sidney for a week, but when he arose again, it was to enjoy this legend. He had been at it for seventy-eight years. Four years ago, when his wife died, he stood, dry in his eyes, blaming her for the cold rain over the hole but loving the fact the burying minister was a Korean Baptist who would have horrified her. Her form of dementia the last years was suspecting that Koreans were taking over all the acting parts on television.

During the actual Korean War, Sidney had volunteered to kill Koreans, having never known they were a possible race. The army turned him down for premature belligerency. Nevertheless, Sidney lied that he slaughtered gooks of all stripes over there and this was what had changed him. Not the guilt but the present absence of such happiness. Melanie, who wanted to know about men and war, looked through him with piercing gray eyes. He could hardly stand her presence. Oh, he wanted to sodomize her and puke on her back, but he certainly didn't respect her.

Even to Melanie herself it wasn't clear why she stayed here by the lake. Wooten's old boat hung by ropes in the
carport next to her station wagon. She could live where they delivered drugs and groceries. She could live in a house next to Eudora Welty, the grande dame of American letters, over in Jackson, the capital city, if she wanted. They would say what a striking woman in the aisles of the Jitney-Jungle, and she could return to a home of bleached, ivied brick, three stories. But the land of wealthy widows and elderly divorcées was not hers anymore, and she feared it.

In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer:
horses
.

NEAR THE BAD RESTAURANT A MILE AROUND THE LAKE
lived the ex-doctor Max Raymond with his wife, Mimi Suarez, the Coyote. She was a good deal younger. They performed Latin jazz with their band at the casino in Vicksburg. The Coyote was Cuban, the singer. She had shining black ringleted hair, very fetching to men and to Melanie too, who adored watching her. She swayed and waved her arms, a torso in a storm of mutiny, the legs beneath her another riot trying to run away from her underwear. And the sheen of sweat under the lights. She was made for tiny dresses and flashbulbs under her face. But this was not the best. Her voice was. Men and women stared at her mouth when she began her singing, startled as if by a ghost flying from her lips. A review had once compared her to Celia Cruz.

But her husband, nearby with his saxophone, the one who enjoyed her pleasures, was a sullen middle-aged creature and seemed to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage. You could imagine him her jailer. His playing was vengeful, abstract, learned at some academy of the fluently depressed. He played against her, mocking or blaming her for her gifts. He had his fans too, but they were ugly people, sneering bumpkin punks and those who had always had the wrong hair. He seemed driven into low postures by her beauty, clawing at a pole to rise, spit, curse and hurl imprecations at her. During his solos, the rest of the band, men, would look up into the rafters as if incredulous about this tax on joy. His few smirking fans wished he would bitch-slap this
Coyote woman once they were home. Because she was so fine, fine, and beyond. Bring her back to heel.

But although he held her responsible for some of his grief, Raymond was gentle to Mimi Suarez in their big decrepit cabin on the lake. He was a sort of Christian, but he despised striving, waited for visions. And was a poet. The Bible and whiskey on his desk, read randomly, drunk grimly. At one time he had thought Mimi Suarez would save him from all lost time. Her fire and rapture and flesh. But time had quit forgiving him and begun running short. He knew his poetry was not good, like his life, but he waited through the weak words for a vision and an act, as you would pan for gold by ten thousand wasted motions. He could get higher, higher to God, by his saxophone, an instrument resuscitated from his high school days when it was only a hole to hide his miserable head in. He needed music, the Coyote and God. And he needed to live close to evil. Mimi Suarez was unaware of this last need.

She did know that Raymond, as the attending physician, briefly, of her violent ex-boyfriend Malcolm, had destroyed the man by urging on his wish to commit suicide, a thing he would announce after beating her. Malcolm became the patient, the weak one needing help, while she sat in the waiting room, black and blue and cracked in the ribs.

Raymond saw her and wanted her. Both he and Malcolm were high on drugs, but Raymond's drug was cleaner, Demerol straight from the hospital. He was certain he had identified intransigent evil in Malcolm. He dared him to be a man of his word and sent him off with several prescriptions. Malcolm succeeded only in giving himself a stroke. He lay now or stumbled, unable to remember nouns, no longer a songwriter, watched loosely by his old gang, who demanded a hearing on Max Raymond as a medical doctor.

Raymond resigned the profession without much remorse and took Mimi Suarez to live with him at a lesser house in Memphis. She too had been threatened by the old gang. Raymond joined the Latin band she sang with by first managing it and buying new horns and electronic refinements, then stepping into Malcolm's old spot on saxophone. They rode the trend for Latin and were very prosperous, as bar bands went. Now they played the long casino job. Because Raymond knew the casino was evil. It meant nothing for a Christian visionary to live among the good and the comfortable, he thought. He wanted no cloistered virtue.

But he began seeing his splendid wife as the cause of his despondency, which increased until he played his way out of it. He felt unmanned by their lovemaking. It was all right when it was a big sin, but now that it was a smaller one undertaken with regularity, he felt weakened. He was both voyeur and actor when he took her, in all her spread beauty, but the part of voyeur was increasing and he knew he was a filthy old haint, as far from Christ as a rich man. He could have lived better with the memory of Malcolm dead, but as a stroke victim who might wander in through a door in Raymond's head at any time, slobbering and gesturing, the guilt he inflicted was infernal, with no finality.

So far Raymond remained a hero to Mimi Suarez. Before Malcolm beat her, mainly for being beautiful and healthy and a drag on his addictions, she was attuned to the old precept of the Indian. Life was a river, not a ladder, not a set of steps. She knew something was wrong, but she was unconscious to living with a dead man, which Raymond in his current state nearly was. She knew many musicians looked reamed and dried and skull-faced, but she did not know that many of them, although mistaken for the living by their audiences,
were
actually dead. Ghouls howling for
egress from their tombs. Pale, his black hair drawn straight back, deep startled blue eyes, Raymond was an older spirit gone into mind, a figure of desperate romance to her still. He hurt for things, and she pitied him as you might a deaf and dumb orphan around Christmastime.

He had chosen the very lake house, which he threatened to buy, for its late history of chaos. The landlord had told about these people proudly. He was in ownership of a rare legend. It was a poor county except around the huge lake and could not even afford much local color. Three years ago its tenants were middle-aged, a proclaimed witch and her sissy husband. The witch had been discovered leading a coven of teenage boys in turning over ancient tombstones in local cemeteries. She had plied the boys with oral sex at midnight. The authorities found the matter too stupid and nasty to prosecute. The youth were from good families the witch woman lived squarely among, in a grid of Eisenhowerera brick homes. Her husband stuck by her, and she meant to corrupt another bourgeois suburb in Shreveport when they left the lake house.

The next lodger was an embezzler who had drunk strychnine while the law pounded on the door. The enormous man, with his hound's eyes, survived, but only as a shrunken wraith in draping skin at a federal pen in Missouri. He had betrayed hundreds of Baptist alumni at the school where he was president, many of whom still prayed for him and were shocked by his transformation. Heretofore he had been taken for brilliant and righteous. But years ago he had lost a teenage daughter, and the more generous said this must be when he turned against God and man. Many of his fellows remained confused, even when they reviled him. He had run with harlots in faraway cities, he had stolen two million dollars, he had become a scholar of hidden offshore
accounts. One dear friend said that when he looked in his own bathroom mirror, he saw the wrath of evil just behind his own regular features. This friend was the man who brought the law to the door. He was devoted to the embezzler and thought him the best man he ever knew. He felt a Judas when he turned in his friend. Many spoke of broken hearts, but this man was an actual case.

Two weeks after the arrest, this man, ex–football coach at the college and a fisherman to whom every second on the water was dear, every bass, crappie, bluegill hoisted dripping from the lake, the effluvia of marine oil and gasoline at dawn, the shuddering motor, the skate across the glassy reds at evening. This man returned to the cabin, spent one night there, went out early in his boat and died. They found the boat making circles in the water a mile out. His body, the sixty-four-year-old body of a once second-team all-American guard, finally dead from an attack on the heart. A chorus of moans back at the little college, and agreement. They had never watched a sadder man. A man who perished from belief in a soul brother.

Then two springs ago, the landlord told Raymond, the realtors he was using, a married couple, moved themselves into this place on its small hill, with its vine-wrapped fence, its bee-loud honeysuckle, dwarf magnolias and the palmettos farther into the dark of the riverine bayous behind. At night you could hear the bull gators,
hunka hunka
, and the bullfrogs. Throats of bleating tin. At dusk, against this forest night, you saw a crane take flight, big as a spread greyhound and purest white.

The couple, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor, were no longer enthralled with each other, but they had a long fishing partnership. Penny sometimes dove from their boat to swim in the green-black lake. The water was still chilly from
Tennessee streamlets into the Yazoo and Big Black, which fed the lake. She was in perfect shape and could stay underwater long distances.

In their slick boat, berthed at the eastern landing, was a cell phone. They were very prosperous in real estate, and they bought and sold lots in the pleasant venues remaining around the lake. Only local poverty stood in the way of a vaster development. It was a fishing, not a sports, lake. Bass fishermen do not as a rule care where they stay. Neither do they have much money left over after the outlay on the boat, trailer and tackle. They have brought their home with them.