Yonder Stands Your Orphan

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INSIDE AT THE WALNUT BAR LEANED THE DISAMBULATORY god of the lake. The man was both lazy and quick. Many sought him out.

You needed the luck, the stories, the bait, the clarity of the water, the barometric report.

The roadhouse was a mile from Eagle Lake, a plank box of one warped room a mile off the Vicksburg highway and up a piece of neglected gravel. It harked back to the fifties, when Vicksburg was wide open. Cecil and Robbie had been coming down from the Delta ever since the days of cotton prosperity. They remembered an era of state prohibition and the curious black-market tax and the Mulberry Street fleshpots. The river walk where bottles of cheap liquor and wine were sold in bathtubs, teenagers and policemen shopping side by side.

The lake was storied for bass and crappie, calf-size cats. Carp and six-foot saurian gar, and buffalo fish, which the poor ate fried in balls. Leon Jr. behind the bar knew all the fishing news. Spinners, plastic lizards, worms, jigs, live bait. What depth and what time of day. Leon Jr., whose father ran the roadhouse in the fifties, was no longer young himself, with a blond-gray stubble and sulking orange lips. He was neither happy nor sad from repeating the same stories. These narratives increased the cost of the liquor nearly twofold. All were aware of this. It was overpriced as if bootlegged, which it nearly was. The place was unlicensed, sometimes locked, sometimes open, depending on the whim of whatever sheriff at whatever season. Sheriff Facetto, newly reelected, seemed to be allowing a month of Christmas.

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