Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah Read Free Book Online

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 thisCoyote 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