Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah Page B

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. LargeLloyd vowed to destroy McJordan, but he was intellectual and was taking his time planning the torture.
    â€œWhat? 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œNo, I know
you
!” said Egan very loudly. Mortimer was not aware of others in the casino.
    â€œEgan 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.
    â€œYou’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