Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah Page A

Not Mrs. Wooten. She still has something that shocks you, that ageless grace, could be the wise elder madam. You couldn’t do with the colored veteran John Roman, though. He’s got a fine name, but you got no appeal with an older black hero. This man looks like he’d sing “Old Man River,” anyway
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    It’s a family dream here. What men and some women pay for, dreams nobody else talks about. You ain’t got your odors, your armpits stink. Everything smells like a new car and roses. No birth control, no AIDS, no sad sermonettes the next day, no apology, no forgiveness. Nobody gets hurt. You get nasty, but nobody needs to kill or rob for it. This is my country
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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