The Marble Orchard (18 page)

“You sound like you been reading the Bible too much,” Daryl said.

“What’s the Bible? It’s a book some crazy fool wrote because he was scared to death of dying. Of not being no more. What I’m talking about is older than the Bible. What I’m talking about will still be around when the Bible has been forgot and throwed away.”

Loat took his hands from the bar and scraped them over his
cheeks, feeling the bones under his thinned flesh. Already, the sickness had pared him down, winding its blind path through his body, chiseling his days away. For most of his life, he’d simply accepted death as an eventual given, but now that its certainty stared him flush in the eye, he found himself checking the mirror more often, as if to gauge how much ground he was losing.

“What do you think Clem cares about any of this?” Daryl asked.

Loat looked away from the mirror. “Who knows,” he said. “Clem’s the one sent Beam off once he’d killed Paul, so you’d think he’s got a spot in his heart for the little sonuvabitch. Almost have to after raising him like his own. Course, he could’ve been just looking out for his own ass. Why you ask?”

“No reason,” Daryl grunted. “Just curious some.”

Loat leaned in close and put his hand hard on the back of Daryl’s neck. “You think on something else,” he said softly. “I don’t want nobody worrying about Clem. I know you been wanting to even the score since he rolled those bad dice out at the mines, but he don’t matter right now. You think on getting Beam.” He released Daryl’s neck.

“You always keeping Clem safe,” Daryl said, turning his head slightly to flex away the pain from Loat’s grip had left. “Why is that?”

“I like to keep all my tools handy.”

“I believe Clem is one that’s worn out his use.”

“Could be,” Loat said. He turned and looked at the crowd in the mirror behind him, his eyes settling on the trucker, who sat propped against the wall in his chair, his greasy hair slung over his head. “I’ll be damned if that sumbitch trucker don’t look like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Daryl half turned on his stool and looked across the bar at the stranger in the tailored suit. The man’s face was gaunt and famished, the lean cheeks and damp curls of his hair making him seem like a fop fallen on hard times. But his eyes seemed to burn
as if something hellish cooked inside them, and a faint sneer rode his lips.

“By God, he does look like Jerry Lee, don’t he,” said Daryl, laughing.

“The Killer,” said Loat, shaking his head. He laughed, then pushed himself away from the bar. “I need some air after hearing that Jerry Lee Lewis wants to be my tailor.” He turned and strode outside, where the sun flared and raked over the white gravel lot.

He was standing beneath the door eaves in what shade they gave when Clem came walking up in the strong heat.

“I didn’t look for you to come out this way,” Loat said.

“I guess it ain’t like me.”

“Not usually. What finally brought you round?”

“I’m looking for Beam,” Clem said. Loat noticed that his hands were trembling at his sides, and his eyes were squinty and bloodshot.

“Beam’s not here,” Loat answered. “Though you probably want me to take you inside and show you every room just so you know I’m telling the truth. I understand that, so I won’t take it as an insult. You thinking I’m a liar, I mean.” Loat picked absently at a thread on his pants. “But I don’t believe you want to go in there.”

“And why’s that?”

Loat jerked his head at the double doors. “Daryl will have you laid out like a side of beef if you set foot inside.”

“I don’t give a shit. I come here to find Beam.” Clem made to open the doors, but Loat stepped in front of him.

“I’m telling you something right now. If you go inside, there won’t be enough left of you to spread on a piece of light bread. Go on back to Derna. She needs you more’n Beam does.” Loat put his hand on Clem’s shoulder and squeezed it softly. “Go home, Clem. You can’t do no good out here.”

Clem looked down at Loat’s fingers lying on his shoulder, the flesh browned and scabbed, the nails yellowed and cracked as old teeth.

“I want to know something,” he said, raising his eyes to meet Loat’s. “I want to know why you gave me those bad dice to roll with Daryl out at the mines. I want to know why you’re always protecting me.”

Loat took his hand from Clem’s shoulder, then flexed his jaw and spat. “I could ask why both you and Daryl were always so eager to do what I said.”

“You’d have killed us if we did otherwise.”

“That’s likely so.”

“Why give me those bad dice, then? Why even have us roll at all? Why do it that way when you could’ve just told Daryl to monkey up that power pole?”

The wind shuffled bits of trash over the parking lot, a few paper cups and beer bottles tinkling against the gravel.

“Then it’d be me he’d be looking to kill,” Loat said. “Not you.”

Clem’s eyes squirmed like a pair of slugs doused with salt. “How do you know I ain’t told Daryl about those dice? How you know I ain’t told him everything?”

“You spook too easy, Clem. That’s how I know. I could say boo right now and you’d scamper back to Derna.” He placed his hand on Clem’s shoulder again. “I don’t have to worry about you breathing a word to Daryl because if that was going to happen it already would have by now. All that you’re going to do is turn around and go home.”

Clem stepped back, and Loat’s hand fell from his shoulder. His eyes jumped a little, a cold light flaring in them, and his breath shortened as if he were on the verge of vomiting. “You’re looking for Beam,” he said.

“So are you,” said Loat. “Which means what you told me the other night about Beam just being off tomcatting was a lie.”

Clem slid his hand to his pocket, hooking a finger in his belt. Behind the Quonset hut doors, the noise of the bar scuffled, making a dull quiver like distant thunder.

“What do you want with Beam?” Clem asked. “He’s never done anything to you.”

Loat spat into the dust. “If he ain’t done nothing to me, then there’s nothing for him to worry about,” he said. “Only, you and I both know that’s not the way it is, is it? There wouldn’t be a need for Beam to hide if he hadn’t done something. Maybe what he’s done is the worst thing he could do. That’d sure give a man reason to run for cover.”

Clem’s eyes widened. He took another step back from Loat, his boots scratching in the gravel lot. He seemed to be waiting, drawing the moment out, as if he thought it might come to an end other than the way he’d expected.

“Go home, Clem,” Loat said. “There’s nothing left for you here.”

A warm breeze startled the grass in the ditches and turned up the white underneathes of the tree leaves. In the spread of fields across the road, dust coiled and spun in evanescent volutes and the air held a loud smell of rain.

Clem fixed his eyes on the ground and seemed almost about to leave when he suddenly shoved past Loat and opened the Quonset hut’s two oaken doors and disappeared inside, the bar noise cutting sudden through the day like brash weather.

Loat stood there for a few seconds, then turned and went inside to the trouble that was beginning.

XV

FRIDAY

They followed the drive, a lane of washed out river rock, the ruts clotted with mud and gashes of ochre glaur, and then crossed a crude bridge where a brook needled away beneath sumac and elder trees. The house sat small beneath maples and pawpaws and a smell of damp and rotted wood lingered in the air. A rusted burnbarrel smoked grayly beside the porch, which was cluttered with several kinds of footwear: tromping boots and loafers of cracked leather, even a few pairs of women’s slippers, all piled against the hickory railings. Squirrel hides dangled from nails driven into the porch’s support posts. Beyond the house was a spread of outbuildings, all succumbing to varying degrees of ruin, and past their mired sprawl was the garden where corn and beans and volunteer cane grew in long green currents.

Pete parked the truck on a bare patch of dirt in the yard, and Ella pulled in beside him. “This is where I get my mail,” he announced. He got out of the truck and walked to the porch. A curtain rod barred the way up the steps. A homemade sign dangling from its rings read, in black shoe polish, GONE INTO TOWN. Pete lifted the sign up and sat it carefully aside. “Come on in here and we’ll see if we can’t find us a cool drink of water,” he said.

When they entered the musky house, Ella planted herself on a calico sofa beside the front door. She took an ashtray blown from green Coke glass off the television, sat it in her lap, and lit a cigarette. Beam remained beside the door. Down the hallway, he could see a woodstove and ricks of oak lined against a wall. Above
this were nailhung hacksaws and come-alongs and singletrees. Through another door he spotted a wrinkled calendar for the year 1974 depending from a wire. It was all like some exhibit at a rustic museum

“Find a seat,” Ella said, pointing to a dinette chair beside the television.

“I need to find a sink and wash up first,” said Beam. “Do y’all have a bathroom?”

“First door on your left,” said Ella.

Beam walked down the hallway, which spanned dim and unlighted. Framed and ancient photographs hung on the walls. A ringer washing machine crouched at the far end like a giant albino toad, its white metal streaked with rust. When he found the bathroom door, Beam yanked the pull-chain and the bare bulb drizzled a feeble urine-colored light over him. Cracked blue tiles lined the walls above the pale green tub, and the linoleum floor was peeling up. Brown water stains coated the unpapered sheetrock about the vanity, and the sink sat in a chinking of grout and spackle. A slice of glazed mirror hung above it.

Water that smelled vaguely of sulfur gushed and spat when he turned the tap. Beam took his shirt off and lathered himself with a bar of homemade soap from a dish on the vanity, scrubbing away the stink. He doused his hair and scrubbed his neck down and soaped his underarms and finally rinsed his mouth, the water burning his throat slightly.

When he returned to the living room, Pete and Ella were sitting together on the sofa, a trio of beers before them on the coffee table.

“These are lukewarm,” Pete said, handing Beam a can. “My fridge don’t get real cool this time of year. But they’ll drink, I guess.” He took up his own can and slurped some down.

Ella picked up a beer and took a sip. She crossed her legs and water dripped from the bottom of the can onto her knee. She stared at Beam with a look he couldn’t place.

“What about those beans?” she asked. “I don’t smell anything cooking.”

“Right on,” Pete said. He got up and retreated to the kitchen, Soon, the scuffle of pans and faucet water came clanging down the hallway. “I’ll be for fixing them,” he called out.

“No hurry,” Ella yelled back. “We’re only starving to death out here.” She stared sharply at Beam, who quickly turned away from her blistering look to gaze at the clutter surrounding him: dingy framed photos and mounded clothing, a weatherbred trunk with split rope handles, three red buttons fallen like a blood spoor in the shag, curious oddments shorn and fragmentary in their corners.

“Why ain’t you in school?” Ella asked.

“I’m too old,” Beam answered, sitting down in the dinette chair beside the television.

“So you graduated then?”

Beam tipped his beer and drank a bit. “A year ago.”

Ella leaned back into the sofa and recrossed her legs, dangling a sandal off her toe and rocking her foot slowly. “I’ve heard some things about that ferry you and your folks run. Don’t know if any of it’s true, but most of what I hear ain’t too good.” She took a long drink of beer. “Is any of it right?”

“Depends on what you’ve been told, I guess.”

Ella ran a finger around the rim of her beer can. “I think maybe I had you pegged wrong,” she said. “You looked just like some punk kid trying to get past a hangover when I drove up into the graveyard this morning. Now you’re starting to look, I don’t know…different.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m not sure.”

She had a look of strangeness to her now, as if she’d suddenly happened upon something she’d previously overlooked. Beam let his eyes wander to the window behind her. He wasn’t used to being looked at by women. At The Doe Eyed Lady, he
occasionally flirted with a few of the waitresses and sometimes made his way to the backseat of a car in the parking lot for a quick grab and stab of fucking, but most of his sexual past was a forgettable assortment of the usual fare of bubblegum girls.

“What will you do?” Ella asked.

“Do?”

“With yourself.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can go home after a while. Maybe they’ll let me do that.” He downed the rest of his beer.

“Who’s they?”

“The folks after me.”

Ella pursed her lips. “If they let you go home, then what? Are you just going to ride it out on the ferry like before?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Ella pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit it. The smoke bowered thick and white and then trailed off into the other rooms of the house. “I want to know what kind of trouble you and Dad got into over at Daryl’s. You need to tell me because he won’t.”

“It was just trouble,” Beam said.