The Marble Orchard (14 page)

Beam thought about the man on the ferry. He saw him sprawled across the floor of the boat with his head smashed, a trickle of blood seeping from his ears. His lean face seemed sculpted out of clay and his eyes were two empty smoking holes.

“What happened to the horse?” he asked.

“What horse?”

“The dray pony. The one with its tail burned off. What happened to it?”

Pete dragged on his cigarette. “Oh, he just plain didn’t give a shit after that,” he said. “But anyhow, what happened to that horse ain’t part of the telling.”

“Why’d you tell me that story?” Beam asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Pete answered. “Maybe I thought it might make you feel a little better to know there’s been a whole score of folks worse off than you.”

“It don’t make me feel no better.”

“No, guess not.” Pete covered his hand with the rag and picked up the can of salve and moved to where Beam lay atop the green tarpaulin. “It never does.” He stirred the salve with one of the aluminum spoons and then measured out a dose. “Lift up your shirt,” he said.

Beam did as he was told.

Pete began ladling the salve over Beam’s bruised torso. Beam winced at the heat, but the discomfort quickly faded.

“Keep that shirt up and I’ll get some bandages,” Pete said. He went to his possibles bag and returned with a roll of gauze and some athletic tape.

“What are you anyway?” Beam asked. “Some kind of country doctor?”

“I ain’t no doctor. What I am is just somebody that knows enough to get well without heading to the hospital ever time my nose runs. Used to be that’s how most folks were. But not no more. Now everybody runs to the doctor at the first ache or pain. Hell, when I was growing up we never called the doctor unless one of the women was getting ready to calve. And there were times when we even tended to that ourselves. My aunt Gracie midwifed more babies in this county than I can count. But not no more.” Finished with the bandaging, Pete pulled Beam’s shirt down. “You keep soap and water and salve on those bruises and they’ll not swell so bad.”

Beam felt the bandages under his shirt. The pain was already drifting away.

“Why’d you help me?” he asked.

Pete laughed. He stood up slowly, rubbing his thighs, and went back to his place beside the fire. He lifted the flap on his bag and brought out a tall green bottle nestled in a cooling glove of woven henequen. He gnawed the cork off and drank. The bottle giggled as the liquor washed into him. When he was done, he stoppered the cork back in with the heel of his palm and dragged his knuckles over his lips.

“What else was there to do beside help?”

“I don’t know. Walk away. That’s what most people would have done.” Beam shook his head. “I know it’s what I would have done.”

Pete set the bottle between his legs. “The thought never even occurred to me to walk away. Those fellers back there at Daryl’s would have killed you.”

“They might do it anyway.”

“That’s surely true. But not yet. Because you’re right there in front of me, drawing air.” Pete passed the bottle to Beam, who held it briefly before yanking the cork out and taking a large swig. The liquor was full of fire and it burned down through him, a bald clean fire that settled in his gut and tended to the warmth already growing inside him.

“You sound proud,” Beam said.

“Take a look at me,” Pete said. “I’m dirty and old with hardly a tooth in my head. What else has a man like me got to be proud of other than helping somebody?”

Beam took another big swig. “I wouldn’t help nobody,” he said, coughing.

Pete took the bottle from Beam and corked it. “That’s no way to be,” he said.

Beam drew a long breath and let it out slowly. The image of the man he’d killed floated before him again, his mouth caught in the rictus of death, his eyes agape in the low burning lights of the ferry.

“Do you think you can change the way you are?” he asked.

Pete cleared his throat and then spat into the fire. “I’d say that’s pretty much got to be the one choice God gives a man,” he answered. “You looking to change yourself?”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather change a few things I’ve done.”

“Now there’s a druthers I’ve not heard before.” Pete leaned his head back and yawned.

Beam looked across the fire at the old man. His eyes were closed. Light glinted off the wet hairs growing from his nostrils and his chest moved with each slow breath. After a time, he began to snore quietly.

Beam rested his back against the hard sack and folded his hands over his belly. He wished he hadn’t taken the liquor. He was not used to drink and now he felt it dragging him toward
sleep. He fought to stay awake, but soon his eyes closed and he heard only silence.

In the hollow of the night, Pete woke to the sound of screaming. Beam was having a nightmare, a blurred watery vision where he was being pulled underwater by clawing white hands, dozens of them, pulling him on down.

Pete shook him. “Wake up. It’s not real. It’s a dream,” he said.

Beam shuddered awake, trembling.

“I’ll build the fire back. Don’t worry.” Pete turned to the smoldering kindling and began stoking it up with a hickory stick, startling brief flares from the embers while Beam continued to quiver like a child beset by the feral terrors of night.

Pete held a match to a crude tender of oak leaves and cedar straw. “I’ll build it back again,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll build it back again.”

XI

FRIDAY

The morning lay worn and frayed on the Gasping River. Sickly anemic light floated down from a sky of clouds, and everything was silent except for the slosh of the current against the shore and the sound of sucking mud and driftwood clashing in the shoals.

Clem had winched the ferry boat ashore and lifted it with a pair of engine hoists so that its rent and broken hull was exposed. He’d already spot-welded the gouges in the bottom and was finishing up by padding tar over the remaining hairline fractures. A small transistor at his side yawned out the early news of the world and then played some kind of country music. Clem worked and tried not to think.

When he was done, he washed the tar from his skin with gasoline from a red plastic jug, cleaned his hands and face in a bucket of suds, and then rinsed himself in the river. He was toweling off with a torn piece of yellow shirtsleeve when the cruiser came down the boat ramp and parked under the locust trees. Clem eyed the vehicle, feeling a pinch in his belly. He fetched the box of Arm ‘N Hammer from the spot in the grass where he’d stowed it and gave himself a healthy tablespoon, choking down the chalky white powder until the roil and splash of his stomach had ceased.

Elvis stepped out of the cruiser, short and thin in his khaki uniform. An empty leather holster on his hip shone brightly.

“Forgot your gun,” Clem called out, poking the spoon back in the box of baking soda as the sheriff approached.

“I don’t need it.”

“Glad you think so highly of me.” Clem sat the baking soda back in the grass and returned to the hull of the ferry boat. He began scraping a putty knife against a patching of J.B. Weld, peeling the gunk off the aluminum and then slinging it from the end of the blade onto the ground.

“Any news?” he asked the sheriff.

“Not really. None that concerns you, anyhow.”

“That’s my favorite kind.”

Elvis leaned against the ferry. He studied its hull, noting the fresh welds and the tar streaked over its keel. “Looks like you met with an accident,” he said.

Clem went on with the knife. “Throttle stuck on me the other night. Run her into the landing.”

Elvis whistled through his teeth. “It’s dangerous work out here on the Gasping, ain’t it?” He noticed that Clem’s hands trembled some as he worked to patch the boat.

Clem gave the sheriff a brief glance, then continued peeling the patches from the hull.

“Stopped by your house before I came down here,” said Elvis. “Derna’s not home. How’s she doing?”

“As well as can be expected. She was gone a few hours yesterday. I don’t know where she went. Driving around I guess.” Clem picked up a square of hard grit sandpaper and began smoothing the repairs flush against the bottom.

“Probably good for her to get out of the house.”

“I suppose.”

Done with his work, Clem laid the putty knife on the ground and walked off the landing into the vetch and pig weeds growing up from the mud. On a dead ironwood branch, he’d tied a stringer of Falls City in the river to cool. He pulled the cans up and they jangled together like chimes as he tore one free and then he let the remaining beers bob down into the water again.

“Care to let me have one of those?” Elvis asked.

Clem looked at him for a moment, then fetched another can
out of the river. He walked out of the weeds to the landing where the sheriff stood and passed the beer to him.

“Didn’t know you drank on the job?”

“I’m not on the job.” Elvis threw his arm out and checked his watch. “Not until thirty minutes ago.” He opened the beer and drank. “I’m clocking in late today. Which means whatever passes between us is off the record.”

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

Elvis nodded and looked across the water toward the far shore where bitterns scratched at the sandy soil in search of grubs, their buffed tawny wings ruffling in the breeze.

“How are you holding up, Clem?”

Clem slugged at his beer. “Helluva thing to ask,” he answered.

Elvis propped his arms over the top of the ferry and looked at Clem. His eyes were strained and bore the hollowed look of lost sleep, the whites a bit jaundiced and cloudy.

“Reason I come out here,” the sheriff said, “was to tell you a few things I thought you should be aware of.” Elvis took a few more sips of beer, then set the can on top of the ferry. “Main one being that Paul had help getting out.” He watched Clem closely for any sign of a reaction, but he only lifted the sandpaper from the ground and began scraping the hull and keel again.

“As you know,” Elvis continued, “he was a trusty down there at Eddyville. They had him on yard duty picking up candy wrappers and sweeping cigarette butts and that’s when he cut the wires. Had to cut through three sets before he reached the outside and not a soul claims to have seen him do it. That strike you as odd?”

“I don’t know.”

“It strikes me as odd. Where’d Paul get the bolt cutters? And nobody claims to have seen him? Those guards at Eddyville are trigger-friendly. They set up there in those towers all day just waiting for somebody to try and escape, but not a one of them saw a thing?”

Clem stroked the sandpaper over the hull over and over
again, the grit making a lean rasping sound against the metal.

Elvis propped his shoe on one of the engine hoists and straightened the crease in his pants. “He had to have been helped,” he said. “There’s no way he could have gotten out of there so clear and easy unless somebody paid off those guards. And then he comes down here and gets knocked in the head and put in the river. Now that’s a pretty blatant mystery, don’t you think?”

Clem stopped scraping the sandpaper over the hull. “Blatant?” he asked.

“Sorry. I use too many words. My sister bought me some of these tapes that’s supposed to increase your vocabulary. Guess she thinks it’ll keep my mind occupied. The word for today is ‘blatant.’ It means apparent, or obvious.”

Clem pushed his tongue into the side of his mouth. “If it’s obvious, how can it be a mystery?” he asked.

Elvis stared at Clem for a moment, then smiled. “I can see your point,” he said.

“That’s why I made it. It’s blatant.”

Elvis broadened his smile, but Clem remained stoic and immobile. “If you’re looking for whoever sprung Paul out of Eddyville,” he said, “I’d start with Loat Duncan.”

“I’ve already thought about Loat. I’m still thinking about him. But I wanted to come down here and get your take on it. Why would Loat go through the trouble of bribing those tower guards just for Paul’s sake? Way I understand, the two of them weren’t ever on very good terms.”

Clem spat onto the landing. “I don’t try and figure out why Loat does anything,” he said. “Whatever he does, he does it out of some store of reasons that wouldn’t never cross the minds of most folks.”

Elvis picked up the can, took another swig of beer, and poured the rest onto the landing, the yellow foam flowing down the slanted pavement into the river. He dropped the empty can on the ground, flattened it with one of his bright black shoes,
then kicked it into the mud beside the ferry ramp.

“What about Beam?” he asked.

Clem crumpled the sandpaper in his fist. “He ain’t here right now.”

“Where’s he gone off to?”

“Couldn’t tell you.” Clem shook his head. “Beam is nineteen and full of bull piss. You know how they are at that age. They just want to go every chance they get.”

Elvis knew most young men were of the type Clem had described, restless and hungry for the night and the going and the wandering, searching out the fumes of girls and the smoky craze of wild life, but Beam had never struck him as this kind.