The Marble Orchard (19 page)

“No.” Ella shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t just trouble. Not if he had to hide you up there in that cemetery. He only goes there if things get bad.”

Beam tightened his jaw. He didn’t want to speak, and didn’t know if he could.

“Tell me,” Ella implored, pinching the cigarette out in the ashtray.

“This fella took my money,” Beam said. “I tried to get it back and he beat me pretty bad. Your dad saved me.”

Ella shook her head again. A strand of hair clung to the sweat on her brow. Like a fracture in porcelain. “There’s more,” she said. “I know there is. Why aren’t you telling me all of it? It can’t be that bad.”

“It can.”

“Listen,” Ella said. “Whatever you’ve done or had done to
you, it ain’t nothing so bad that you got to act proud around me.” She moved to the edge of the sofa. Beam thought she was going to touch him then and he stiffened, but her hand never came. “I’m old enough and have seen enough where nothing don’t shock me no more. So you go on and tell it. That’s my daddy in there. He won’t tell me because I’m his little girl and I’m all he’s got so he thinks he’s got to keep me safe. But I need to know what he’s gotten himself wound up in. I’ve got to make sure that I’m keeping him safe.”

Beam leaned back in the dinette chair. The aluminum legs creaked beneath him. It seemed odd to think of a woman keeping anyone safe. He’d never considered such a thing possible. But then he thought of his mother, going through her duties without a word, and he wondered if all of that was a way of sheltering everything she loved.

“I did something awful,” Beam said. “You ever done anything awful?”

“I have.”

“Well, I bet you never done nothing near as bad as what I did.” Beam wiped absently at his lap, though it seemed like the dirt was fastened there and he couldn’t clear it away.

Ella’s eyes lay blue and cool upon him. “A woman can get in as much trouble as any man. Maybe more. We can get in more trouble because we’re not allowed to be in trouble. So when it finds us, it’s worse.”

“What’s all this talk I’m hearing about trouble?” Pete called out as he entered the room bearing a pot with cotton holders. He sat the pot on the coffee table and lifted the lid, letting the steamy smell of hog jowl and beans boil out. “Can’t be no trouble when you got beans like that,” he said, waving one of the holders over the pot. He went back to the kitchen and returned with bowls, spoons, more beer, and a sack of Wonderbread. He ladled out the beans, thick in their sauce, and the three of them set to eating.

It was some time before any of them had the energy to
speak again. They seemed to have come to the end of a large and ponderous labor, and sat there in a numb and jolly silence. Beam was the first one to speak. He’d been studying a ring of small slender bones hanging on the wall above the television and his curiosity brought him slowly out of the fog of eating.

“What are those?” he asked, pointing at the bones.

“Those,” Pete grunted, rising to pull the ring from its keeper nail, “are coon dicks.”

“Pardon?”

Pete shook the bones and handed them to Beam. “Coon dicks,” he said. “Coon has a bone in his peter. They’re good for luck.”

Beam ran his fingers through the bones as if drawing his hand over a lacey fringe. They had a faint tinge of brown age, and bits of hide clung to them.

“Take you one off there.” Pete reached and jostled the ring. “You might need it.”

“No,” said Beam. “I don’t think I do.” But he continued to hold the bones in his hand, and after a moment, he unhinged the hasp holding the ring together and unstrung one, slipping it into the pocket of his jeans.

“Maybe it’ll bring you a spell of fortune,” Pete said, as he hung the ring back on the wall. “As you can see, they’ve made me a rich man.” He fell into a fit of beery giggles, and Beam and Ella joined him.

As the sun tilted down into the house, it seemed possible that trouble had become something hidden so deep in the far away woods that it could never reach them again.

They spent the rest of the night talking and drinking. Long tales told in the quiet house, stories fetched down from the rafters like aged heirloom quilts. Beam weaved in his chair, a cairn of beer cans building under his feet. He was full of words, his jaw oiled by alcohol. He spoke boldly of things that held little consequence,
which made bright slivers of light rise in Ella’s eyes.

Very late, Pete rose, yawning. “I believe it’s time for me to bed down.” He wobbled in his boots when he stood up. “Beam, you can just lay out on the couch here. Take that old throw off the back if you get cold.” Ella and Beam watched him slowly leave the room. For a spell, they heard him bumbling in the back of the house, and then there was the creak of box springs, the settling of blankets, and they were alone. Moths bumped against the ceiling. Somewhere off in the dark, frogs boomed and creek water rushed over stones in a low ferny place.

“Why don’t you turn out the light,” Ella said.

Beam looked at her. Her eyes had turned low like lantern wicks.

He stood and yanked the string hanging from the ceiling, remaining still as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a time, he could make out the shape of Ella on the couch. Her thighs appeared smooth as jade in the loose moonlight falling through the window.

“Why did you want me to do that?” he asked.

“Because it’s nice sometimes,” she said. “Do you want to come sit down here by me?”

Beam nodded. Then he remembered the light was out. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

The couch felt airless beneath him. He smelled Ella, her sweat and a hint of citrus perfume.

“I was married once,” she said. “He wasn’t a bad man, but we never got along much.” Ella moved closer to Beam; her breath fell warmly on his neck. “It didn’t last long. It wasn’t supposed to, so I don’t miss him. It might have gone on for a long while, but I didn’t let it. He caught me, just this one time, with another man. I don’t know why I did that. But it happened and he caught me and that ended it.”

Beam let his head rest on the back of the couch and waited for her to speak again, but there was only the moonlight and the
frogs and the creek going off somewhere in the night. He thought of the girls he’d been with before, always a rush of messed clothing in the back of a car or in some bedroom where things spilled out quickly and then were done, rank places reeking of soured carpet and cigarettes. He knew this was different somehow, and the thought of how different it was made his blood pulse stormy and thick.

“Sometimes, I get to worrying about it,” Ella continued. “Whether or not he’s forgiven me.”

Beam picked at the ravelings of thread poking out of the sofa. “Sure,” he mumbled. He didn’t know what to say. He’d never known what to say to a woman.

What success he’d had with them was due either to the false confidence of alcohol, or to the fact he caught them in a moment when they were as desperate and hungry as he was. It wasn’t that any ever chose him. Ella was different though. The soft warmth in her eyes told him that she did choose him, not with bravado or arrogance, but with the slow careful ease of one who has waited a long time to make this choice.

“Lay back,” she whispered.

Beam took his head off the back of the sofa.

“What?”

“Lay back,” she repeated.

Slowly, he slid himself down on the couch. He was drunk from all the beer and the room wound out around him in blue shaking shades. When he felt her roll against him, he nearly coughed.

“Easy,” she breathed, as if trying to calm a spooked horse. Then her hands were on him. They swam under his shirt, over the washboard of his stomach, her nails pinching the hair on his chest, rattling the bandages on his wounds.

“What’s this?” she asked, thumbing the gauze.

“Your dad doctored on me.”

She patted the bandages, and then undid his jeans, the brass
fasteners clinking. When her hands touched him again, he jerked at the coolness of her palm. She crept between his thighs and ran her tongue over him and he groaned dully, feeling her teeth. She was stroking him now, a kind of ghostly shape rearing in the slats of moon.

“Is this all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

She took her shorts off and he smelled her sex, a bright aroma of salt and sweat. When she straddled him, he lifted his hips to her as she slid down slowly to fit the wet grip of herself to him. She pushed him down with her palms, and their breathing, hushed and steady, quickened together as Ella’s hair sprawled over her damp cheeks. Beam felt his thighs shiver. His body spread electric to its very ends until Ella seized up and moaned and fell heaving onto his chest, her hair wadded thickly in his mouth, the patter of her heart loud against his ribs.

He lay there with her, tracing her spine, until here were only dreams and then night and nothing else.

Her cold, dry hand shook him out of sleep, her voice in his ear whispering, “Get up.”

Through the blinds, the moonlight seeped in thick and frigid.

Outside, a man called steadily, the sound sinking long and drowsy through the night.

Beam sat up. “What is that?” he asked.

Ella pushed herself off the sofa. She dressed quickly, shucking her shorts and blouse on, then parted the blinds. “Somebody’s out there,” she said.

Beam dressed himself, bumbling into his boots, and when he looked out the window he saw the long span of a Cadillac sitting in the yard, a mess of dogs standing in front of the car next to a man who held a rifle perched on his hip. “Sheetmire,” he called. “You come on out here so I don’t have to come in and get you. Be easier on everybody that way.” The man’s voice sounded like
gravel spitting against the wood siding of the house.

“Who is it?” asked Ella.

Beam backed away from the window, startling the beer cans piled on the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. The sudden sound of a rifle being loaded spooked him. He turned and Pete stood in the doorway feeding cartridges into a battered Springfield.

“That’s Presto Geary,” he said. “Loat’s right hand.”

Beam and Ella crawfished their way to the far corner of the room, where they stood motionless. Pete finished loading the rifle and wiped the barrel with his shirtsleeve, then crossed the floor to the blinds and pinched them down with his thumb. “It’s just him and the dogs far as I can tell,” he said. His breath made a small blossom of fog on the pane. He let the blinds settle back. “There could be others hid out behind us somewhere though.”

Ella drew the hair away from her eyes. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“You need to sit down, first thing,” Pete said.

Before she had a chance to, a shot fired and the front window shattered, the glass falling over the back of the sofa, the blinds clattering as a gush of wind blew in. All three of them dove to the floor.

“Hey, Pete,” Presto called from outside. “Better let me have that boy in there. He ain’t worth getting killed over.”

Pete clicked the safety off his rifle. “Sure thing, Presto,” he hollered back. “Hold your fire. He’s coming out.” Pete scooted on his haunches to the door and put his hand on the knob. Looking over his shoulder at Ella and Beam, he said, “Y’all lay down flat.” Then he yanked the door open and fired three quick shots in succession, the rifle’s muzzle barking white fire. Two of the Dobermans yelped and fell curled and writhing in the dirt, while the last shot shattered one of the Cadillac’s headlights and then went singing off into the dark. Pete slammed the door and rolled deep inside the room, propping his back against the sofa. Presto then opened up, a series of shots slapping the house, bursting the
windows and splintering the door.

When the gunfire ended, Pete drew himself into a crouch against the sofa and reloaded the Springfield and laid it over his knees.

“Everybody good?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Ella.

“Beam?” Pete asked.

“Yeah?”

“You ever been in a gunfight before?”

“No, sir.”

Pete shook his head. “Damn. I was hoping somebody here would know just how the hell this kinda thing was supposed to turn out.” He ran his hand over the rifle. “I guess we’ll just have to learn by doing.”

Quiet settled among them briefly as they listened to the trees clawing the roof. “What are we going to do?” Ella finally asked.

Pete continued to stroke the stock of his rifle. “If we can hold on until daylight maybe he’ll give and leave. He’s parked in the moonlight so I might could peg him if I got to.”

“We need to call somebody,” Ella said.

“And who might that be?”

“The sheriff.”

Pete grunted. “Of course. Crawl over to the phone there and see if the line ain’t been cut. But I can tell you now, Presto has already done thought that.”

“Maybe he forgot.”

“Go on then, try the phone.”

Ella stared at her father seated against the edge of the sofa. Then she rose up and ran to the phone and pulled it from its cradle, but only empty air whirred in her ear. She fingered the rotary, but no tone came.

“It’s dead,” she whispered.

“I know,” said Pete. “Now get down and don’t get up again.”