Read Online Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah - Free Book Online

shouted his way, but the adult couple seemed oblivious. Speakers of another tongue.
    He knelt here at the boat ramp with chipped granite boulders banked close to it, red sand to either side. It was his first time at the lake, he had come to take a boat from aman deeply in debt to him. The man had wanted to fish one last time in it. He was waiting. The girls were the first exciting thing he’d seen in weeks.
    At this juncture he had no plans to hurt people around the lake. He did not like bodies of water much, had never seen the ocean. He was indifferent to trees. Soil was hateful to him, as was the odor of fish. But like many another man forty-five years in age, he wanted his youth back.
    He wanted to have pals, sports, high school girls. This need had rushed on him lately. He lived in three houses, but he had no home. He did not like the hearth, smells from the kitchen, an old friend for a wife, small talk. It all seemed a vicious closet to him. He moved, he took, he was admired. But he had developed a taste for young and younger flesh. This was thrilling and meant high money. Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it.
    Religion had neither formed nor harmed him. Neither had his parents in southern Missouri. But he despised the weakness of the church, and of his parents, whom he had gulled. He was a pretty boy born of hawk-nosed people. It was a curse to have these looks and no talent. Long, lank. Hooded eyes, sensual lips that sang no tune. Still, he quit the football team because of what it did to his hair, claiming a back ailment that had exempted him from manual labor since age fourteen. There are thousands of men of this condition, most of them sorry and shiftless, defeated at the start. Many are compulsives and snarling fools, emeritus at twenty.
    His parents doted on him. The pew in the church also hurt his back, he said. But he would go with them now and then, a martyr. Because already he liked to mock the sheepish Methodist minister, to whom the world was a terror from which he led his little flock in long, constant retreat.The hymns of this church were like the moan of doomed animals to his ears.
    Mortimer’s parents were both unassertive postmen. They had no other children but kept a chicken yard in the back, which mortified him. He was often in the house alone, indisposed to school, to the wretched town, where almost everybody walked with a sag. A neighbor boy showed him a pornographic picture when he was fifteen, and the bone-deep thrill of seeing that woman in her happy pain had never left him, had never diminished. He looked for it behind every curtain of culture, of law.
    His likeness to Fabian had attracted many girls, then women, often several at once. They loved his brooding, his shy muttering, his brute eyes. He seemed all hooded by his brows even when he had nothing on his mind. The thick wavy hair was eloquent for him. These were girls of lesser elegance, lesser clothes, lesser cuteness, but nice enough.
    At home one evening he screamed out suddenly that he didn’t have a fine car or any money, and he knew that the two of them, his parents, were hiding it for themselves. He promised he would never attend their funerals. There would be no grown son to honor them when they passed. He frightened his mother and father. They gave him a nice car and money. When he got enough, he left them. There was other money too, from the three girls who left with him, one of them a student teacher from a nearby college. She was his first conquest of the better sort, the scioness of a middling-wealthy owner of a department store. She had good legs, spectacles, grammar. He spent some years doing manual labor but cushioned by women, who gave him money. Then around thirty he found his calling, as most do.
    He did not know the term
gigolo
. Something about him canceled scruples in women. He didn’t know what thatwas either but accepted it as a birthright. For reasons he