The Marble Orchard (26 page)

“There’s a roll of dollars in the top drawer of this desk,” he said.

The trucker rose from his chair and came around the desk. He opened the top drawer and took out the roll of money and peeled off two twenties and then re-banded the roll and replaced
it in the desk and shut the drawer. He folded the money into the breast pocket of his blazer and looked down at Daryl. “That Loat got a grandmother?” he asked.

Daryl shook his head. “She’s been dead a long time.”

“Well, I still might fuck her anyway,” he said. Then he winked at Daryl and left the room.

XXI

SUNDAY

She was eating her lunch aboard the ferry when the cruiser slipped under the locust trees and parked on the landing. As the sheriff walked up, she continued to stir her fork through the bowl of tuna salad and she kept her head down and did not look up when his black shoes boomed on the metal hull.

“Afternoon, Derna,” he said.

She chewed and swallowed. “Elvis,” she answered.

“Clem not working today?”

Derna laid the fork in the bowl and placed it beneath the lawn chair she was sitting in. “Clem’s gone,” she said.

“Oh? Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head once. “He left out Friday afternoon. Said he was going for groceries but he never come back.”

Elvis rested his hands on his hips. “He took the truck?”

“He took Old Dog.” She nodded. “I don’t look for him to be back.”

Elvis moved closer to her and squatted beside the lawn chair, catching the sour scent of her body mixed with the warm muggy stench of the river.

“Why don’t you think he’ll be back?”

Derna narrowed her eyes at him. “I think some folks have seen to it that he can’t never come back,” she said.

Elvis stood up. “What time did he leave Friday?”

Derna shrugged and looked out at the river where the shoals
flexed against the hull of the ferry. “Two or three, I guess. But it don’t matter. You won’t never find him. Be wasting your time if you was to even start looking. Same goes for that boy Beam of mine.” She threw a hand out, wiping it through the damp air. “Both of them gone.”

“You didn’t tell me Beam had left.”

“Clem sent him off,” she said.

“Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

Elvis rolled his tongue inside his mouth nervously and then gripped the boat rails, his hands braced and spread before him as if to stall the waters, or at least slow them to the sidereal coming and going of the world itself as it clocked imperceptible through the void and its glassy black hourlessness. “You said some folks had seen to it that Clem wouldn’t come home. Who did you mean?” he asked.

“You know who I mean. Don’t make me say it.”

“Do you think saying a name to me is going to bring you more trouble than you’ve already had?”

“You don’t know him like I do. He can read sign. He can track what’s gone and know what’s to come.”

“Next you’ll be telling me he can fly, too.”

Derna hardened her eyes and glared at Elvis. “I’d not mock what you don’t understand,” she said. “He was born in the dark of the moon with a caul over his head. You can’t know what that means other than he isn’t the kind of man that can be touched by the law. Not your law, anyway. Maybe not even God’s law.” She pulled at the edge of her collar and a smile crawled up one side of her face. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said.

Elvis looked at her. With her eyes as fixed and solid as knobs of cold white bone, Derna did look a bit crazy, though he’d never tell her such a thing. He thought back through the years to when he’d first become sheriff and had learned of Derna, and the rumors of her whoring days, and he realized he’d never been anything but
worried for this woman, who seemed to stare in constant aghast surprise at the world, as if she could not believe how far it had come away from what she had hoped it would be. “I think,” he said, “you’re a woman who’s had more than her share of hardship and that it’s no wonder the things it’s causing you to say. But what I really care about knowing is why all of this is happening. There’s two men missing and one drowned in the river. You need to tell me what you know, Derna.”

She fretted with the collar of her blouse some more and then sighed. “Most men,” she began, “they love something, they see that it gets satisfied. They want to keep it and tend it so that it grows and gets healthy. Loat’s not that way. He takes love and swallows it down until there’s not a bit of it left in the world. You understand that and maybe you can know what it is you are up against.”

“You and him were in love?”

Derna nodded. “A bad kind of it.” She stood creakily and moved beside Elvis at the boat rails. Her fingers tapped the steel, her eyes studying the river as if it were a book, a worn keep of verses that even now were being writ with the ceaseless churn of the waters. “I left off whoring because I loved him. So I could only be with him. Then I found I had to leave him because what stood between us was the kind of love that would be a ruin to the both of us.” She turned and looked at the sheriff. “That’s when I took up with Clem. Clem could give me peace, but not love, so Loat didn’t mind me being with him. At first, I thought that meant Loat loved me so much he only wanted me happy. But I know that’s not how it is now. He wanted Clem to have me because he could keep me close that way. He could say anything and Clem would do it.” She blew a long breath out and raked her hand along the rail. “And it’s that Daryl that has been laying for Clem for now on twenty years. Ever since what happened out at the mines.”

“I was out at Daryl’s just yesterday,” said Elvis. “There wasn’t
a sign of Clem or his truck.”

“And there won’t never be. Clem is somewhere at the bottom of a strip-pit and that’s where his truck is as well, I imagine.”

Elvis straightened himself. “You think Daryl caught him out somewhere?”

“No. I think he went to Daryl’s looking for Beam. I think he had to go out there. It kept eating at him, the way he’d been all his life, in the keep of Loat. I think he finally got tired of it and he had to go out there. He never was a hard man, but the world kept asking him to be. I suppose I did some of the asking myself.”

“I’ll get a warrant and search Daryl’s bar.”

Derna slammed an open hand against the boat rail and a long tone shivered down the metal. “You’re not listening,” she said. “There’s nothing left of Clem. He’s gone. You can peek under every rug and curtain out at Daryl’s and that’s not going to change. I am telling you this because you came to me. And you looked like you wanted to know. Well, I’m saying it. You can’t best these men. So don’t try.”

Elvis raked a shoe over the hull of the ferry. “Clem sent Beam off and then went looking for him? That what you’re telling me?”

Derna crossed her arms and stared at him. “I guess you think that don’t make sense.”

“No, I can’t say that it does.”

Darts of shadow bled across the brown shoalwater beside the ferry and then coalesced into a single blot as a school of shad fled from a largemouth bass. Derna watched the chop and sling of the river while it broke on the white riprap along the bank. “Get old,” she said. “Get old and then you’ll see it. The way it is for most folks, they spend a good bit of their life trying to get back what they give away. They believe giving it away will save them because to have it makes them afraid. But then it’s gone and they’re the ones that made it leave and that eats at them until they go out to get it back again. Clem wasn’t any different.” She dropped her hands over the rails and watched the shad tremble and shift
beneath the surface of the river. “
I
ain’t any different,” she said.

“Does this have anything to do with Paul getting killed?”

Derna twisted her eyes away from him. “It’s no harder thing in the world for a mother to say, I don’t reckon. And I just don’t believe I’ve got it in me to say it.”

Elvis took his hat off and stroked the brim. “I don’t believe you need to say anything,” he said. “There’s room enough in the not saying for me to figure what you mean.”

A car braked on the far landing and honked its horn once. Derna slid her hands along the rails. “I thank you for the visit,” she said, “but I got to work now. I’m what all is left to do it.”

Elvis placed his hat back on his head. “I’m going to help, Derna,” he said. “I don’t know if you believe that or not, but it’s what I’m going to do.”

Derna smiled at him as she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ears. “You’d do well to wake up so you can see the ditch you’re headed for,” she said flatly. She moved off to start the tug. The motor gurgled up, a yellow froth churgling from the trolling prop.

Elvis stepped off the deck onto the landing and watched as the ferry drifted into the river, the brown current furrowed and wimpling against its hull as the hawsers strained through their pulleys. He watched for awhile as the rudder cut its faint brief grooves in the river, and then he walked back to the cruiser and drove to the courthouse in town.

XXII

MONDAY

In the afternoon, a quaky crowd of whores and miners gathered behind the Quonset hut. They sipped whisky from jelly jars, the men hugging closely to their women, many of whom were dressed in satin negligees. Loat stood among the crowd patting the head of the goat Samhill Doug. The day before, he had paid Daryl seventy-five dollars for the animal. He had then attached a dog collar and leash to the animal and led it out into the gravel lot behind the bar, where he left him overnight, without food or water. The fasting had sharpened the goat’s eyes to a hard and steely meanness and his hackles bristled with anger.

The trucker, prim and slick in his suit, his hair gleaming under the day’s cloudy light, bounced over. He tickled Samhill under the chin, which drew a neigh.

“I want you to show us just how good of a surgeon you are,” Loat said. “It’s what you claim, so I want to see some evidence.”

“You want me to take this goat’s kidney out?” the trucker asked in response.

“I’ll need it done myself,” Loat said, whispering to keep from being overheard by the onlookers. “But before I let somebody that dresses like you put me under the knife, I got see whether or not you can do it.”

“I can sure enough do it,” the trucker said. “Cutting a goat is no different than cutting a man. It ain’t nothin’ but a simple division of the flesh.”

“Well then,” Loat said, “let’s be for having it divided.” He
walked over to a lounge chair someone had brought out and sat down and folded his hands behind his head. “Go to it,” he commanded.

The trucker lifted himself on his boot toes and bobbed in the gravel. The crowd stirred jokey. The whores chirped and gushed, scooting their bare feet over the ground and stirring the dust in their ceaseless talking.

“First thing we need to do,” began the trucker, “is to put a little sleep on this goat. Sing him a lullaby, you know.” He bent down and took a jar of bonded whisky and a vial of brown glass from the pocket of his trousers. He opened the vial and poured a faint yellow solution into the whisky, stirring the concoction with a finger long and pale as a skewer.

“What’s that you’re putting in the Old Crow?” Loat asked.

The trucker capped the vial and returned it to the bag. “Laudanum,” he said. He then straddled the goat. Samhill bucked, but the trucker put his knees into the animal’s ribs and lowered him to the ground. He pushed two fingers into the goat’s nostrils, lifted its snout, and poured the entire jar of whisky down his gullet. The goat swallowed and gagged and shook its head, flapping its ears as it stood and staggered.

“We’ll wait a time,” the trucker said. “Give the whisky space. Let it abide in him.”

The interval between sobriety and drunkenness was perhaps a quarter hour. The trucker paced the lot during this time, his lips pulled into a dreamy smirk until eventually the goat lay down and rested its head on its forepaws.

“Is he ready?” Daryl asked. He had taken a seat beside Loat in a nylon lawn chair, his cheeks glossy with sweat.

“He’s nearly there,” answered the trucker.

“I hope to hell he is.” Daryl looked over toward a wall of clouds rising in the west. “Looks like rain to me.”

The trucker turned and glanced at the coming weather. Then he knelt beside the goat, lifting and releasing its head, which
slapped the ground loosely. “I believe he’s ready.”

Rolling Samhill onto his belly, the trucker slung himself against the goat’s bulk. When he’d positioned the animal to his satisfaction, he turned to the crowd.

“Someone bring me my valise,” he requested.

“Your what?” someone drunkenly responded.

“That satchel I got,” he said.

Someone tossed him a cracked bag of brown leather, which landed at his feet. He bent down and reached inside, his hands shuffling through the bag, its contents clanking together noisily.

“You always carry around a satch of tools?” asked Loat.

“I do,” the trucker said cheerily. His hands burrowed deeper into the bag until he brought out a long curved knife that looked like no knife anyone in the crowd had ever seen. The handle was titanium, but the blade stemming up was white steel, and bent at an odd angle. It appeared almost like a slender silvery trout. “Now see, it’s no telling what the world will throw at you,” he said. “I like to be ready for whatever it is.” He leaned down beside the goat, lifted the animal’s hind leg, and slid the knife across its groin. The crowd jawed and yammered as the animal’s blood blackened the ground. “Now see, they say a man ain’t got but two things to do and that’s live and die, but I believe we are all of us better suited to the dying part than to the living.” The trucker continued making angled cuts across the goat’s gut. “There’a start and a finish to ever thing, but that finish is gone last lots longer than that beginning, ain’t it? That makes a man wonder, is he supposed to live or is he supposed to die? Now see, a goat is carried about in the same rude form as any man.” He paused and looked up at the crowd. “Or maybe man’s form is ruder.”