The Marble Orchard (17 page)

But when he thought of Derna, the laughter died out of him. He recollected her browned wavy flesh, the slight pout of her belly, her eyes staring over his shoulder as he bent between her thighs, and something about the hiss of her breath drying the sweat on his skin while he rode her down into the sour mattress made his heart tremble wickery and frail. She’d brought several ghosts with her when she’d visited his house, and now they stood at his back in a crowd.

Breathing deep, Loat caught the stink of the room, like the inside of a dry cistern, rusty and tarnished. He coughed into his hand and strode naked across the room to the dresser against the wall where a fifth of Lord Calvert sat. He took a long drink and shook the burn away. Beside the bed was a small porcelain wash bowl full of water, which he dipped his cock into, the first cold shock making him shiver before he let the piss go. The water glowed golden before him, a drop of blood clinging to the brim
of the basin. Suddenly, a sharp pain cut through the small of his back, and he had to steady himself against the dresser until it passed.

Shaking himself dry, Loat found his pants and shirt on the floor and dressed himself slowly in the drear light of the room. His Remington .45 lay on the dresser. He flipped the cylinder open, checked the cartridges glinting in their chambers, then snapped the cylinder home and stuffed the gun into the elastic of his Hanes, the barrel cold against his groin.

His boots slouched by the door. He struggled into them without sitting or retying, stamping his legs deep into the soft mealy leather, rocking a wild shadow out onto the wall greased with sunlight leaking through the curtained window. His straw hat hung on a bedpost. Lifting it up, he stroked the brim clockwise, a morning ritual taught to him by a dimly remembered uncle as a way to ward off thoughts of death. His fingers whispered over the straw and he circled the brim twelve times, a half-day’s revolution, massaging out the grim dreams that might assail him.

He settled the hat over his head carefully, watching the tilt of it in the dresser mirror. He’d long been a studier of signs, a watcher of skies. All his family seemed touched by such gifts. His father, a man dark and thin as a riding crop, had been the one to tell him the way of careful eyes. When he was a boy, Loat had stood on a ridge of black trees in a dawn broken gray and cold as the old man had pointed out the tremble of ants, the quiver of pine needles, the catch of a note in a warbler’s throat, and announced that it was all the melody of the future, that what was to be could be foretold and even changed if one knew how to cipher the song. “These are the ancient tones,” he said. “You learn them like you know your own name.” And Loat had, through years of the old man bursting into his room in the night, drunk and angry, roughing him from sleep and yanking him into the kitchen to read a scattering of eggshells, to prod and dig through
a cup of wormy earth, to tongue the pith of a turnip and say what the taste meant.

His father lost his eyes for ciphering in later years, or so he said. The woman gone—where to? who could say?—and his life a flume washing him into the gullet of death, one day he needed Loat to study a tapeworm the dog had vomited up, to say what its writhings were—rain? flood? ruin?—to make the day yet born to stand shivery and wobble-kneed before him. “What’s it say? Read it, boy!” The old man shouted, pushing Loat’s nose toward the slick, bisected worm as it twisted and suppurated on the walnut tabletop. “What’s to come? What’s the worm say?” Loat tried to read the sway and shiver of it, but his eyes were bleary from sleep and his father was shouting and he couldn’t say for certain what anything meant at such a dead hour.

“I don’t know,” he finally stammered. “I can’t read it.”

The old man let him up. He stood back and his eyes jerked with nervy light. “Then you’ll eat it,” he said, taking the pieces of worm from the table and clamping Loat by the hair and yanking his head back to force his mouth open.

Loat clutched his belly and thought of the worm. He wondered if it yet spiraled in his innards. Times came and he felt he could see to the very end, actually reach out and graze the downy cheek of the future. But those were days of rarity. Mostly, he wondered at how he’d lost his ciphering eye just as his father had, and if blindness was not a congenital failing of his blood.

He took the bottle of Calvert from the dresser. It dangled from his hand like a dead fowl, the liquor sloshing inside. When he opened the door, his best hound was there, the one he alone tended to. It lifted its head from its paws and in the crystalline dark of the hall its eyes glowed like ironlode.

“Enoch,” he said. The dog stood, wagging its tail nub. “Let’s walk.”

The two of then went down the hall. Loat kept close to the
wall, letting his free hand drag over the peeling oilpaper while the dog trotted behind like a vague canine ghost, ashy and gray in the shadows, until they emerged into the light of the bar. Suddenly, everywhere was the clink of glasses, the chisel of talk, the light through the windows withering down over the floor into the long jots of dust and gravel that had been tracked in from the parking lot. The jukebox played something nervous and stricken.

Loat sat down at the bar with his bottle. The tender stood at the other end using a butter knife to prize gold fillings out of the teeth from the jar, scooping out handfuls of them and scattering them on the bar panel. When he looked up and saw Loat, he took a shot glass down from a shelf and brought it to him, then went back to his paring.

Loat poured himself a shot of Calvert and sipped, petting the dog beside him, running his hand under its collar while the whisky flamed beneath his ribs. In the mirror, he studied the patrons. Mostly folks he knew, scabrous farmers and coal miners milling about like forms hacked out of shadows. An outcropping of the vagabonded and derelict.

He tapped his glass against the bar and the tender came down to him.

“Got something for Enoch?” Loat asked.

The tender, a large man with a face fat and yellow as wax, nodded. He lifted up a metal gallon bucket of pickled eggs and sat it on the bar. Loat took two out, flung the brine off, and fed them to the dog, the greenish yolks crumbling onto the floor. The tender smiled and sat the bucket back behind the bar and returned to working the teeth.

Loat turned to regard the crowd. Daryl, clearly drunk, sat on the bed on stage with the goat, its head resting in his lap. The suit-wearing trucker sat in a chair against the wall drinking a bottle of Falstaff. Tilting his head to catch a view of the cage of rafters above, the previous night came back to Loat, crawling up like a black spider from a sink drain. After Derna had left him,
he’d received the call about Beam being here at the bar, but when he’d arrived the boy was gone. He spent most of the night looking for him. First to Pete Daugherty’s shack, but the place stood blank and lightless, the windows showing only the old man’s clutter, racks of magazines slouching on the floor and rungs of peppers hanging from the ceiling joists to dry. Then it was into Drakesboro, barreling full horse, coasting motel parking lots looking for Pete’s truck, but they had found nothing. Asking questions at the movie house, the restaurant and diesel station out on the parkway, but all the waitresses and vendors seemed beleaguered with ignorance, their jaws slack as they yanked popcorn from their hair or lit cigarettes under the dull marquee lights. Presto had gone back with the dogs to wait in the woods behind Pete’s shack, and that’s where he was now, but Loat knew it was a gamble that the old man would return anytime soon. He could lie out in the high weeds for weeks, living off creek water and grub worms, and as long as Beam stayed with him, he could do the same. Then just as suddenly, the two might be spotted in town drinking milkshakes at The Dairy Queen. It was that inconsistency, that inability to predict the old man’s next move, that made him so hard to track. Loat didn’t know if it was cunning or simple luck, but Pete had a way of shifting and shaping himself to fit any crack in the earth, sliding in quietly as water. The man was a wood witch, a healer. Loat had always kept his distance because of this, but when the sickness struck, he went to Pete for a fix because he was known to trade in such, but the healing didn’t take and now Loat fumed with hatred toward the old man and his quack medicine. And, to top it off, he’d commandeered Beam, pushing himself into business not his own. Whatever magic Pete might possess, Loat would make him use it.

He turned back to his whisky. In the mirror, he watched Daryl cross the floor to the bar and come up beside him.

“How’d Freda treat you?” he asked, swinging himself down onto a stool. The tender sat a bottle of Jax in front of him with a straw.

“She’s got an old blowed out pussy.” Loat shook his head slowly and sipped his Calvert. “But I guess I can’t complain about what comes free.”

Daryl smiled. “There are other girls not quite so broke in. You know you’re the one picked Freda.”

“I’m aware.”

“But then, maybe your mind is somewheres else.” Daryl leaned into his straw. “Maybe you’re thinking about somebody else.”

Loat dipped a finger into his whisky and sucked it dry. “I don’t think about women,” he said.

“You don’t?”

“I never understood men that thought too much about them. Women are like freight trains. Every ten minutes another one comes down the line.” He raised his glass and clinked it against Daryl’s beer. “Freight trains,” he said, throwing the rest of the shot back.

“What have the doctors told to you?” Daryl asked.

Loat turned the shot glass upside down and rested his hand on it. “A year,” he said. “That’s how long I go without something gets done. It’s in the early stages so I can still fuck. I just can’t hardly piss and my blood is getting bad. They wanted to put me on that dialysis, but I told them to kiss my ass.”

Daryl suckled his beer. “It had to have been Beam that killed him,” he said after a spell. “After what Derna told you about Beam being the one to wreck the ferry and Paul winding up drowned like that, there’s no way it could’ve have been anybody but Beam.”

Loat folded his hands and propped his chin on his knuckles. “I know that.”

“But you can’t figure out why, can you?”

“I’m not trying to figure on the why of it. What I care about is finding him. He’s put me to death, killing Paul. I aim to do the same for him.” Loat turned on his stool and looked out across the floor. A few couples were dancing, the women smearing
their makeup on their men’s shirtsleeves while the music brayed. Against the far wall, the trucker in the suit leaned in his chair. A beer bottle poked from his breast pocket. His hair drooped oiled and sloppy into his eyes. “That trucker there is making himself at home, ain’t he?”

Daryl watched the mirror. “Claims he wants to dress you,” he said.

“Dress me?”

“In a suit. Thinks he’s some kind of tailor. Got a load of fancy clothes in his rig. Says you’re the kind of man that needs sharpening with slacks and a blazer.”

Loat poured another shot and drank it down quickly. “Only man I’ll ever let dress me is the undertaker.”

“I’ve told him as much.”

Loat placed the empty shot glass on top of the bottle of Lord Calvert. Then he stood and stretched himself, the blear of the whisky making the room tilt and sway.

“Know what else he claims?”

Loat balanced himself with a hand on the bar.

“He claims,” said Daryl, “that if we find a kidney, he can do the surgery. Calls himself a night doctor.”

“Is that right?”

“Says he learned it in the service.” He turned and looked at the trucker leaning in his chair, the bottle of Falstaff sprouting from his breast pocket like a boutonnière. “If he can do it, that’d save us trying to squeeze one of these county doctors. I know you don’t trust doctors no way.”

“What makes you think I’d trust some truck driver wearing a suit?”

“It’s your general disposition.”

“Is that so?”

Daryl licked his teeth. “You’ve not heard this feller talk on life and the wide straying ways of it. He’s a silver tongue.”

“That don’t mean he’s worth a damn as a sawbones.”

“No. But he’s your kind. Believe me.”

Loat spread his hands out on the bar. “I’d have to see some evidence that he knows what the hell he’s doing before I let him cut on me.” He patted the wood, his nails scratching the varnish. “I don’t think he can do that.”

Daryl shrugged. “You get your back to the wall, you might be about ready to try anything.”

“I ain’t even thinking on getting a kidney now.”

“On account of Paul getting killed?”

“It has to come from blood,” Loat said. “When Paul turned up dead I knew that was it. It don’t matter now what kind of dirt I’ve got on any of these county doctors because Paul was it, he was bringing it to me, carrying my life with him. No way in hell I’m going to the county clinic to get on one of those fucking waitlists like every other cocksucker that’s dying and get some piece off a somebody I don’t even know. Hell, they might even give me a nigger kidney.”

Daryl giggled, his squat form jouncing on the bar stool. “It’s got to come from blood? What the fuck does that mean?”

“It’s what I believe.”

“What you believe?”

Loat nodded. “Blood is the only thing you can count on.” He straightened his hat in the bar mirror. “There ain’t nothing else. Not where I’m coming from. It’s blood or it’s nothing. Money, women, land—none of that don’t add up to anything close to righting a man or giving him what he needs.”