The Marble Orchard (25 page)

Sitting there in his plush chair as the smoke snaked through the air, he was nearly asleep when the trucker entered the room.

“Afternoon, Daryl,” the trucker said, seating himself in one of the metal folding chairs in front of the desk.

Daryl opened his eyes slowly. He swallowed some phlegm, then jerked his chin toward the doorway. “You girls go on outside,” he said to the whores.

The women flowed out of the room in a flurry of perfume and lace. The trucker watched them go and then turned back to Daryl. “Now see, there’s just not many men so lucky as to be kept by a clutch of such beauties,” he said.

Daryl waved a pink stump through the air. “Cut the bullshit. I want to ask you about some things the sheriff told me when he visited the other day.”

The trucker leaned forward, placing his hands on the desk, his pale fingers like strange anemic flora taking root in the black grain of the wood. His eyes were a pale, chilled blue. “Now see, it just don’t matter to me,” he said. “I can talk all day and tell all
kinds of things.”

“What I want told is the truth.”

“I can sure enough try that.”

Daryl squirmed in his chair, the plush vinyl squeaking beneath him. “The sheriff claimed you paid a visit to him,” he began. “Said you told him all about the ruckus you had with Beam up here. Is that true?”

“Every word of it.” The trucker’s lips bent into a smile.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you put in a hole in the ground then?” Daryl propped his stumps on top of the desk.

The trucker’s smile faded to a look cold and savage. Slowly, he reached in his blazer pocket and then drew his fist out, holding it aloft above the desk, and when he opened his fingers a pair of dice clattered down on the wooden top. They were carved from ivory and as yellow and worn as old teeth. “What’s the number I just rolled?” he asked

Daryl squinted at him. “I don’t have time for any of your shit. I want to know why you went to the sheriff.”

The trucker pointed to the dice. “Just tell me what number I rolled.”

Daryl leaned forward to study the dice. “Nine,” he said.

The trucker scooped up the dice and spilled them across the desk once more.

“And now?”

“It’s nine again.”

“A third time then.” The trucker dropped the dice, one after the other.

“It’s still nine,” said Daryl.

The trucker reached down and took up the dice and held them in the flat of his palm. They glistened in the sash of window light cutting into the room; their yellow was suddenly gone as if washed away, and they might have been a pair of eyes prized from the head of a ruffian hustler, so white and wet did they now
appear. “Now see,” he said, “these are loaded dice.”

Daryl slouched back in his chair. “I can’t say I give a damp shit,” he said.

The trucker closed his fist over the dice and rattled them together. “You might, if I tell you where I found them.”

“Be for telling me,” Daryl asked.

The trucker placed the dice carefully on the desktop. “These were in Clem’s pocket,” he said.

“Is that right?”

“I found them when I was dragging him out back to the ditch. Right before I put one in his brain.” He folded his hands together. “I’d say they’re the same pair he threw with you out at the mines many a long night ago.”

“Maybe so. It don’t make no difference to me either way.”

“It should.”

“Why’s that?”

The trucker produced from his vest pocket a small magnifying glass. He stood and held the glass over the dice, his face so pale he appeared like some manic lapidary ghosted from the outer realms to barter jewels as might dot the crown of a profligate fool, a man brought here by the forces of fate to inspect the fulhams in a gaming room where all stood to win nothing but a loss utter and total.

“Check the initials on these,” he said.

Daryl pushed himself forward and peered through the lens. Etched into each die, in a tiny near illegible script, were the letters LD.

“What Clem told me before I took him out back,” said the trucker, “is that Loat gave him those dice. That they were the same ones he tossed with you out at the mines. That Loat made sure it turned out the way it did.”

“A man who is about to die will say anything,” Daryl said. “Plus, you could have plucked those dice off anyone and then scratched those letters on there. I got no reason at all to trust you.”

The trucker placed the magnifying glass in his pocket and straightened the lapels of his blazer. “Do you believe that in your heart?” he asked.

“My heart? You talking pretty now, ain’t you? I don’t ask a thing of my heart. Only children and women are fool enough to go with their heart.”

“I won’t try and convince you, then,” said the trucker.

“And why’s that?”

“It’s beneath me.”

“Beneath you?”

“I won’t waste time stringing a fence around the truth so you can see how it’s shaped.”

Daryl eyed the trucker. He sat sleek and firm, his hair raked over his scalp, his breaths small and easy as if he were sipping idly at the air. “It don’t make sense,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Loat putting his initials on those. That’s a dumb thing to do.”

“Now see, there’s some men made that way,” the trucker said. “They got to put their mark on everything they touch. They got to let the world know what belongs to it and what belongs to them. Now see, Loat’s marked you just like he marked these dice.”

“What are you talking about?”

The trucker picked up the dice and spilled them forth over the desk again. “Cast these bones out and so he made of you a man only mostly there,” he said. He picked up a single die and held it pinched between his fingers. “You got his mark just like these dice. Now see, it’s not enough for Loat to have things and have them do what he wants. He’s got to put his sign on it. Got to play that old whore whose name is legend and whose strength is legion.”

“I don’t have one clue what you’re talking about,” said Daryl, shaking his head.

The trucker placed his hands down flat on the desk. “Now
see, you build a legend around a man with what he owns and what he’s done and he’ll look as big as God himself from the outside. And Loat ain’t no fool. He knows the game well enough to fix it.”

“You saying he owns me?”

“Don’t he?”

Daryl fell silent. He thought of all the years playing tote-along to Loat, running his drugs and giving him a cut from what he made on the whores, Loat snickering in his dreams so it seemed that Daryl often woke to the sound of the man’s laughter. And then his mind pushed even further, to the night at the mines when he’d crouched in the blue moonlight to throw dice with Clem, Loat standing beside them like a sleek totem, his eyes burning down at the circle of dust where the dice lay scattered. “That’s it,” said Loat. “Clem rolls nine. You got to climb it, Daryl.” After that, the rush of light and heat, the fire and the fall, the black pull of the air, the smell of electricity, of singed hair and the soft padding of grass that caught him.

“I don’t see why he’d want to save Clem like that,” Daryl said, almost whispering now. “Why he’d have him throw those loaded dice so it’d be me to maybe get killed and not Clem.”

The trucker slid the dice off the desk into his palm and pocketed them. “The why of it don’t matter so much as you knowing it’s the truth,” he said.

Daryl blinked as if noticing the man seated before him for the first time. “Why are you telling me any of this?” he said. “And why did you go to the sheriff and tell him about Beam?”

The trucker shifted in his chair. “I want a price,” he said. “You can understand that, I’m sure. Being a businessman, you have to shop around.”

“Did you think there’d be some kind of reward out?”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Then why go to Elvis?”

“I didn’t say the price had to be money.”

Daryl raised a pink stump to his chin and scratched his whiskers. “If it ain’t in money, then how would it get paid?”

The trucker looked around the room, as if perusing it for appraisal, eyeing the scattered wealth of televisions, liquor, the promise of women that might be worth his services. “I’ll not refuse a dollar,” he said. “But I might like to have it paid in other ways.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Prices and payments. What the fuck is it you’re selling, anyway?”

The trucker cocked his head back and drew a long breath that made it sound as if the air about him were sizzling. “Now see,” he said, “I got this trade. It’s the thing I was born to, so I got to go out and work it. Man don’t work at the trade he’s born to, he’s lower than dirt in my opinion. When I stopped in your bar the other day and seen the doings that went on here I knew I’d come to the right place to work.” He leaned forward and placed his hands on the desktop again. “You give me a fair price and I’ll bring Loat to you.”

“That your trade? Murder for hire?”

“That’s part of it. I’m a damn fine hand at piano, too. Play that boogie-woogie. That doo-wop. That rock ‘n roll. Got some Mozart and Beethoven up my sleeve, too. Classical shit, you know.”

“I ain’t in the market for a piano player,” Daryl said. “And if I wanted Loat gone, I could’ve done it myself years ago.”

“Now see, I just don’t think that’s the truth. He’s the big fish in this pond. But I can tell you ain’t no small fry yourself. Pond’s too small for two big fish. One got to go belly up. But you ain’t had the sauce to catch that big fish all these years so I think you need a man got the bait.”

Daryl stroked the desktop with one of his stumps. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You just happen by my bar after giving Beam Sheetmire a ride up here. Okay, maybe that just happened. But now you’re telling me you’ll kill Loat for a price? And all this
after going to the sheriff?” Daryl shook his head. “That don’t hold water.”

“Going to the sheriff was just me shopping around,” said the trucker. “I had to gauge all the angles and make the best play. Now see, it’s like a piece of music. You can play it just like the sheet says and that’s what most do. But they’s a kind like me that wants to push the song and make it really talk. Make their own arrangement. Going to the sheriff was just me playing a scale and seeing how the notes all fit together.”

Daryl sat silent for a spell, his eyes leveled on the trucker as if he could see something ancient and undiluted in him, like the misty banks of the first morning’s broken shore where the waters lapped at the warming mud, and it might have been the print of God’s own finger there.

“All I want,” the trucker said, breaking the silence, “is to bring you Loat. You leave Beam to me to deal with as I see fit.”

“What do you want with Beam?”

“He called me a thief.”

“And that’s enough to make you want him dead?”

“I can’t abide it.”

“And you can’t get Beam unless Loat is out of the way. You saw that clear off, didn’t you?”

“I see lots of things.”

“How much would it cost to do this?” Daryl asked.

“Forty,” said the trucker.

“Forty?” Daryl coughed. “That’s steep trade.”

“Now see, I don’t mean forty large,” he said. “I just mean forty.”

“Just forty?”

“That’s right. All I need is a little walking around money. Enough to buy a sandwich and put some diesel in my rig. You can even consider me doing that Clem feller a cash back advance on services soon to be rendered.”

“This all sounds like a pile of hot horse turds,” Daryl said.

“You may think so,” the trucker said, “but I don’t like to be called a thief. I don’t like to be called nothing I ain’t. Don’t mind a bit if a man calls me all kinds of dreadful things, so long as they’re accurate. Why, a man might say, ‘He’s low down scum. He’s killed men and he’s whored and gambled and he fucked my grandmother. He’s an egg-sucking dog and I hope he dies.’ Now see, none of that don’t bother me because ever bit of it’s true.”

“Whose grandmother did you fuck?” Daryl asked.

“Can’t remember.” The trucker lifted a hand and slung the greasy net of his hair over his head. “I used to try and fuck ‘em all every chance I got. Now see, I can’t keep track of the ones I fucked and the ones I was aiming to fuck but never got around to. It’s a bad and worrisome state to be in.”

Daryl stared at the man seated in front of his desk, his eyes a cruel and frozen blue. He’d never seen such a creature in his life. Suddenly, his chest began to quiver as a jolt of cold ran the length of his spine. It felt as if someone were stabbing the soles of his feet with chilled ice picks. He’d only felt this way once before, and that was the night out at the mines when Loat commanded him to climb the power pole with the pair of bolt cutters.

“I can do for Loat same as I did for Clem,” said the trucker.

Daryl tapped his feet against the floor. The sharp pains continued to run up his calves, and the ends of his stumps began to itch so that he scratched them against the edge of the desk. What the trucker said was true. Loat had always treated him like a lapdog, tossing him a few scraps here and there, but never letting him gnaw his own steak. And then there were the dice. He heard them clattering down over and over in his mind, and their echo gave him all the reason he needed.