The Marble Orchard (10 page)

“Care for a smoke?” the trucker asked.

Beam shook his head. “No,” he said. He stepped back and looked at the trailer with its greasy coat of char and road residue. “What are you hauling?” he asked.

The trucker thumped the cherry from the end of his cigarette and then tossed the butt away. “Suits,” he answered.

“Suits? What for?”

“All occasions.”

“I guess I’d have to say I never wore one,” Beam said.

The trucker gawked incredulous. “Say you never did?”

Beam shook his head. “Not that I can recall.”

“Now see, we can fix that.” The trucker stood up from the guardrail and wobbled off to the rear of the trailer. “Come here,” he called, lifting the trailer door.

Beam walked to the back of the rig. Its interior loomed in cavernous dark, but the gray light filtering in revealed the first rows of plastic-wrapped suits hanging like cocoons, their sleeves pressed and freshly cleaned, cufflinks winking asterisks of light.

The trucker climbed into the trailer and disappeared. Beam heard him rummaging through them, the plastic crackling and breathing, and when he reemerged and stepped down onto the gritty shoulder, he was carrying a brown worsted suit folded over his arms.

“This one here looks like it’d fit you,” he said. He made to hold the suit against him, but Beam backed away quickly.

“I don’t want to wear any suit,” he said. “I’m fine in the clothes I already got on.”

The trucker dangled the suit from his fingertips. “You don’t look fine,” he said.

“Well, I don’t intend to put on any suit.”

The trucker shrugged and tossed the suit back into the trailer. “You’ll wear one someday,” he said. “Whether you intend to or not.”

“No.” Beam shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe I will.”

The trucker shrugged again and then reached up and yanked the trailer door closed and secured the latch.

“It don’t matter at the moment,” he said. He turned and walked back to the cab. “Come on. We’re going.”

Beam walked around the trailer to the rig’s passenger door and pulled himself inside. He settled the duffel at his feet and rolled the window down and rested his arm on the sill. The rain had stopped, and thin yeasty smears of mist spumed over the treetops and the highway. The trucker fixed himself behind the wheel, cranked the engine over, and the rig quivered to life, the stack pipes croaking diesel smoke. He turned to Beam, his eyes grayed in the dim of the cab as if taking cue and color from the glum weather outside.

“Where is it you’re headed?” he asked.

“Wherever,” said Beam. “As far as you’ll take me.”

The trucker nodded once and put the rig in gear. “Now see, that’s just fine,” he said, pulling out onto the highway.

VIII

THURSDAY

It was still early when Derna left in Old Dog. She followed the river road out of the bottoms and drove slowly, leaving the emerald flats of corn until the shade of the hardwoods covered her so that she traveled through a murk stretched cool and thick over the highway. From a thermos, she drank warm sassafras tea and she briefly played the radio until it grew tedious and she flicked it off so that only the clatter of the truck’s engine filled the cab.

An old way led her to the place she sought. At first, she thought she wouldn’t remember how to get there but then it all came back to her, up from the country of farm-loam into a bulbous knot of hills smelling hot with morning, onward past slumping barns and trailers sulking in sedge grass, limp wire fences torn loose by the winds, then coasting by the sawmill where mounds of dust stood like melted tallow on the sludgy black ground, the men pacing to work as the light fled down about them in a tremulous spray, a few lifting hands to her as she drove past.

At a small gas station, she stopped and bought cigarettes and a ham sandwich on light bread with mustard, which she ate in the truck while sitting in the parking lot, her hands trembling some as she lifted the food to her lips. When she was finished, she brushed the crumbs from her blouse and went on to the place she’d never forgotten.

The house had been repainted a faint blue. It sat above the road amid pin oak trees, and the tossing shadows of the leaves made it appear to wobble like a mirage.

She pulled into the yard and parked beside Loat’s Cadillac.
He owned two, a white late sixties model, which was the car sitting in the driveway, and a powder blue one with tailfins. Owning two Cadillacs wasn’t a display of wealth on Loat’s part, but a manifestation of his superstitious ways, as he wouldn’t drive the white Cadillac at night, believing that riding in a white car after dark could invite madness or even death. He was full of such beliefs. He checked the cycles of the moon, thumbed through almanacs for cures and ways to read the weather for sign of things to come or the whereabouts of things passed on from this world.

Derna hadn’t minded his penchant for what many considered nonsense because Loat was a man others respected and feared and he seemed at first to be the everything she’d often dreamed of while growing up poor and hungry in the mud hills. But all of that was before. Before she took to drink and became a whore out at Daryl Vanlandingham’s bar, before she’d learned what Loat really was.

She exited the pickup. A collection of rusted box springs leaned against the north side of the house, and lengths of mirrored glass had been nailed to the wall in various spots. Derna adjusted her hair in the mirrors as she approached the porch, then rose up the rock stoop and onto the boards, her black plastic shoes worrying tiny eddies of dust around her ankles.

She moved to knock on the screen door, but instead stopped and turned to look at the yard. It had been mowed, and the smell of bruised grass hung damp and sweet on the air. Beyond the yard lay Loat’s garden, tended and firm with stalks of corn and caged tomato plants spread down the lengthy furrows, along with several hills of potatoes whose leaves showed the white powder of Sevin dope. There were squash and okra, as well as a trellis of half-runner beans and a row of peas. Loat had strung a dead crow from a cane pole in the center as a deterrent to others of its kind, and the bird dangled by a single foot, its splayed black wings glinting with blue-black iridescence.

Derna remembered standing on this porch while evening
plummeted to earth and she listened to the cars brushing by on the highway beyond, wondering if one would take her away. Of a night sometime, she would stand there until Loat found her and led her by the hand back to the house, his voice far off and subtle as he placed her again on the old mattress ticking in her room, the creak of the springs as they bore her sleepy weight like the sound of a stone sliding perfectly flush against other stones, a thing being guided into its exact slotted place.

“Found your way back didn’t you, Dollbaby,” she heard Loat say.

She turned to find him standing in the doorway just behind the storm screen, which made his features grainy and blurred. He opened the door for her and she entered. The house flexed dim around her, the only light what seeped in through the curtained windows. Immediately, she smelled the dogs.

“What about your hounds?” she asked.

Loat raked the hair flush over his scalp and smiled as he closed the door behind her. “They ain’t here,” he said. “Presto’s taken them out to run a few rabbits.” He moved away from the door and stood back to regard her, looking her up and down as if trying to reckon a price, his dentures set in his bottom lip and his hands stowed in the back pockets of his trousers.

“You look good, Dollbaby,” he said. “Considering what all you been through here lately, you look real good.”

“I see you painted the house blue,” she said.

“Some time ago. I forgot it’d been that long since you been out.” He walked deeper into the living room that was empty save for a ragged Lay-Z-Boy recliner and chewed Naugahyde footstool. “Come on in here to the kitchen. We’ll sit a spell.”

She followed him. A brown boot lace hung from the ceiling fan, and Loat pulled it and light scattered over the chairs and Formica table spread with envelopes, prescription pill bottles, a few gnawed pieces of white bread, drill bits, and a jelly jar full of nails and ink pens. The strippings of a deer rifle lay across one of the
table chairs, the barrel slick with fresh bluing, and a wire bore brush blackened from use lay on the floor. Flies droned everywhere.

Loat went to the faucet and ran water in a coffee cup. He brought it to Derna, and she held it with both her hands as if the room was cold and she expected the cup to warm her fingers.

“Drink that,” said Loat. “It’s good water.”

Derna held the cup to her nose and sniffed. “Used to not be,” she said. “I can remember when you could hold a match to what came out of that tap and it’d flame there was so much sulfur in the water.”

Loat smirked and scratched the small bud of his nose. “Not anymore,” he said. “I got some of those asshole magistrates to finally run a city pipe out here.” He pointed to the cup in her hands. “That is some of the best water dirty money can buy.”

Derna sniffed the cup again, then tipped it to her lips and drank. The water tasted warm and vaguely metallic and she held it in her mouth a long time before she swallowed.

“What’d I say? It drinks good, don’t it?” Loat smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s good.”

Loat pointed to an empty seat at the table. “Sit down,” he said. He lifted the deer rifle from the chair, placed it on the four-eye stove and then sat down himself.

Derna sat down at the table, stowing the cup of water in her lap. “I heard you’re sick,” she said.

Loat placed his hands on his knees and leaned toward her, his eyes hooded and cold as craters on the moon.

“People talk,” he said.

“Usually not without they got a reason to.”

“They don’t need a reason other than it gives them something to do with the air other than breathe it.”

Derna placed her cup on the table. “You aren’t well though, are you?”

“The one thing wrong with me,” said Loat, “is that I’m getting old.”

Derna leaned back in her chair and stared at Loat. His cheeks had grown sallow and lean, and a raggedy tremor clutched in his chest when he drew air as though his lungs were cluttered with trash.

“My kidneys are bad,” Loat finally said. “I can’t pass good water and when I do, I’m pissing blood.”

Derna pinched her fingers into a beak and poked them into the coffee cup, then dribbled some water over her wrist and worked it in until her skin felt damp. “It don’t matter none to me,” she said flatly.

“I know it don’t. But you didn’t come out here to ask questions about my health. You want to know about your boys.”

She looked at him. There were things she wished to say but she held her tongue. It felt like glue between her jaws, and what could she say, really? Too many things, she supposed. Curses and prayers. More questions that led down old nowhere paths to old nowhere ends. She’d lived with Loat for close to six years and in all that time she’d never known the man to allow talk to go any way he didn’t want it to. It was a strange power he held, and she felt it working on her now.

“Must be real hard on you,” he said. “Paul’s gone and now that other one Beam has lit out.” Loat put his chin against his chest and stared at her, his eyes softening a bit.

“What do you know about Beam?” she asked.

“I know what Clem told me the other night ain’t so. I know Beam ain’t just off tomcatting. He’s straight gone, ain’t he?”

Derna clinched her fists in her lap. “Clem says he’s just out on a drunk. But he’s been gone since Tuesday and he’s got that sleeping sickness.” She kneaded the dress in her lap, making biscuits like a cat. “Are you looking for him?” she asked.

Loat shook his head. “What would I want with Beam?” He sat back in his chair and stroked his cheeks. “Though it is some curious the way he just up and left so close to Paul winding up drowned in the river.”

Derna brought the cup to her lips and felt the cool porcelain as she sipped the last of the water down.

“Why did Clem lie to me the other night?” Loat asked. “Beam’s off tomcatting? If that’s the case, nobody’s seen him. So where’s he at?”

She felt him pulling her a way she did not want to go, his voice clinging to her like mud as it sucked her down.

“Did you kill Paul?” she managed to ask.

The question caught Loat off guard and his eyes roiled slightly before steadying.

“You’ve gone wrong asking that,” he said. “Why would I kill Paul? He was mine.”

“You’ve gotten rid of plenty that belonged to you.”

Loat clicked his tongue and swallowed. “Same could be said of you, I reckon.” He stood and went to a cabinet, where he took down a bottle of Lord Calvert. He poured some into a coffee mug and drank it, then poured himself another shot and turned to her.

“As I recall, you’re the one left Paul behind for me to raise,” he said.

Derna ticked her fingernail against the cold coffee cup on the table. She felt Loat leading her toward things she didn’t want to talk about, not with him, and she lurched a bit in her chair as she fumbled with her own thoughts. Outside, the wind tossed and wrapped itself about the house like a palsied hand hiding a candle flame, and the windows bucked and bowed with each gust.