The Marble Orchard (30 page)

When he’d done all he could for Filback, Elvis sat down on the pavement. He closed his eyes. Far off, sirens. A red shriek in the night. He knew he should get up and go to Ella, that he should comfort her in some way, put a hand on her and remove whatever nightmares flushed through her mind, but he only sat there with his eyes shut, hearing the sirens and waiting for some kind of dream to come out of the night and the corn to take him away from all this.

XXV

The smell of blood was thick inside the rig. Loat leaned against the passenger side door, gritting his teeth. A few pellets from Filback’s shotgun had glanced his neck, and he kept a hand over the wound as it bled between his fingers. Enoch, the Doberman, tried to lick at the blood until Loat slapped the dog away and it slunk into the floorboards.

“Good that you can do that,” said the trucker.

Loat looked at him. “Do what?”

“Hit the dog. Means your spine is okay. The shot either nicked you or only wedged in the muscle.” The trucker grinned. “No worries so long as you don’t bleed to death.”

Loat put his head against the cold window and watched the dark runnel by. More corn. Trailers. A tin warehouse haloed by a security light. The glow of a soda machine. Corn again.

“Don’t talk to me,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to have to answer you because it fucking hurts to talk.”

The trucker laughed softly. “I’ll just talk to Beam, then.”

Beam sat between the two men, staring ahead at the road. If he so much as shifted his weight the Doberman muttered a low growl, so he remained motionless.

“I guess you thought you and me was done, hey?” the trucker asked him. “But here you are.” The trucker slapped Beam’s knee. “Right back with me riding in the wild country.”

Beam wadded his hands together in his lap and did not speak.

Loat lifted his head. “We all need to just shut the fuck up and
ride and not talk until we get to where we’re going,” he said. The blood dripped like the beads of a rosary.

“He’ll be okay,” the trucker said. “But I don’t guess you’re too worried about that, are you?”

Beam shook his head. “No,” he said. “I ain’t.”

“Now see, you’re probably just curious about why we’ve been so eager to get a hold of you. I mean, Christ, I shot a deputy back there. Feller don’t act that way less he got reason to.”

“I know why you been after me,” Beam said. His voice surprised him in its steadiness.

“Do you, now?”

“Yes.” He nodded and pushed himself hard against the seat, holding his breath. All the while, he’d been smelling Loat’s blood and he knew now it was his own blood and that it flashed inside him with a heat and a power stronger than any prayer he might have offered to the quick and silent dark.

“Well, then you know you did your own brother in. But where are we taking you and why do we want to take you there?”

“I don’t know.” Beam shrugged. “Maybe you’re going to kill me.”

The road dipped suddenly and the tires whined as the rig staggered through a curve.

“Now see,” said the trucker, “that just might be the case. I got a mite of a bone to pick with you and maybe killing is the only way that bone gets picked.” He turned onto an unmarked highway hedged by weedy banks of thin sumac and mimosa. The headlights of the truck flared against rain puddled in the dip of a bend. Vagrant moon fluxing bright and dim through the tree limbs, the road granular beneath. The sky coarsened by stars. No houses. Distant barns rising on the hillsides. “I can’t abide anyone calling me a thief,” he continued. “Now see, it’s true that I took that money off you while you was sleeping in my truck. But I didn’t steal it.”

“You don’t call that stealing?”

“No sir. I give you a ride, so the money was just a payment for services rendered. Hell, you’re a businessman yourself, running that ferry. You ought to understand a fair price for fair work.”

“I usually say upfront what a job costs before I lay a hand to it.”

“Now see, I knew you’d say something like that. But here’s the way it is, see. I give you this ride and we’re rolling down the highway and all of the sudden you start to sleeping. Right there in my cab. Now see, a sleeping man ain’t shit for company. Way I figure, I’m owed at least a small dollar for driving your lazy ass around.” The trucker waved his arm through the cab. “I can’t be giving rides to lazy folk and not expect to get paid. And expect to get paid without having my good name run through the mud and be called a thief and all manner of unpopular and outright untruthful things. Don’t you see what I’m talking about here?”

Beam flexed his hands in his lap. At his feet, Enoch had begun to snooze. Loat remained slouched against the passenger window. His breath cast erratic glazes on the cold glass while the road seemed to slip and dive through a country of strange sleep.

As the road came on, bearing him toward whatever place he’d finally be done in forever, the thought of his death jolted through him like a polished blade and in one motion he reached over and jerked the wheel so the rig surged from the road into the bank and a long howl boiled up from the gutworks of the machine as it rolled from the roadway and plunged into a ravine, felling cedars and sapling hickory as it flumed downward with a wavy surge of black soil rising in its wake until it turned upright again and stalled against a girthy oak. Then, nothing but a trickle of noises. Fluids. Gear oil. Antifreeze. Diesel. The drip slithery in the dark. A hiss of water slapping hot metal.

Beam was sprawled on his back across the dash. The windshield had broken free and the glass had scraped his arms, but his injuries felt slight and he managed to raise his head. Loat lay wedged against the passenger side door. His eyes were open and
for a moment, Beam believed him dead until he blinked and then worked his jaw, twisting it open and closed. He leaned forward and spat a bloody clot onto his lap.

“The fuck you do?” he slurred.

“Wrecked us,” Beam said.

“The fuck for?”

“So you wouldn’t kill me.”

Loat choked and spat again, his lips reddened with blood. He wiped his mouth with his wrist. A pistol gleamed in his fist.

“How bad you hurt?” Loat asked.

Beam lifted a hand to his face and scraped a seam of blood away. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe not too bad.”

“I think I made it out all right myself. Might have knocked a few of my fillings loose, though.” Loat closed his mouth and slowly worked his jaw some more. “We got to get out of here,” he said. “They’ll be looking for us.”

Beam shifted his hips and a hot shank of pain slid through him, all the way down to his heels. “Go on then,” he managed to say.

“You’re coming with me. And anyway, that windshield’s the only way out. Driver’s door looks stove in and mine over here is blocked by this oak tree. So we’re both going to have to crawl out.” Loat swept the pistol through the air. “Go on ahead.”

Beam rolled onto his side. The frame of the windshield was torn, and bits of glass clung to it like jagged teeth. Beam struggled through the opening, the glass cutting his hands and belly, and then slid down the hood into a soft nest of black dirt. He nearly passed out, but he steadied himself and walked from the rig to rest against a fallen hackberry log.

“Now, that’s lots better, ain’t it?” Loat’s voice swam to him through the dark as he staggered toward Beam through the dead leaves and broken limbs. He held his wounded neck with one hand and the pistol in the other, and the blood draped over his shoulders like a stole so that he appeared sanctified and holy in
the silver moonlight. “That fucking rig ain’t worth pissing on.” Loat arched his back, then leaned forward and spat blood on the ground. “Where is everybody else?” he coughed. “You didn’t see that trucker or my dog anywheres?”

“There weren’t nobody else that I saw.”

Loat pushed two fingers under his tongue and whistled. When the dog didn’t appear, Loat whistled again and waited and listened. Only the wind spun and chattered in the leaves. “Enoch,” he called into the night, but the dog didn’t emerge. Loat spat and shook his head. “Fucking dog,” he said. He lifted his eyes and stared through the trees at the ravine where the saplings were broken and the earth gouged and rutted. “Come on.” He waved the pistol. “We got to get up to the road.”

“Why?”

“Because we got to get the fuck out of here. Don’t tell me you want to stand out here in the woods and bleed all night.”

Beam gripped the hackberry log under him. “I guess that depends on what you aim to do once we get up to the road,” he said.

“You ain’t got no say in this,” Loat said. His voice moved through the night with a reedy hiss. “You come along and follow me now.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll kill you.”

Beam squished his hands into the damp moss that grew on the hackberry log. “I don’t believe so,” he said.

“Don’t, do you?”

“No. If you aimed to just kill me you’d already done it.”

Loat drew the slide back on the pistol and shucked a round into the chamber. He aimed the gun at Beam’s chest. “Go on and talk then if you think I’m all bluff.”

The wind slid off the top of the ridge and into the ravine to cool the sweat on Beam’s cheeks, and he felt suddenly chilled to the core, staring at the bore of the pistol, but he shook his head
slow and easily. “I’m your blood,” he said.

Loat stood poised before him, his breath labored and ragged through the tiny vents of his nostrils.

“I’m your blood,” Beam repeated.

Loat lowered the pistol. “More than that,” he said. “I’m your daddy.”

“That’s right.” Beam said. “And you’re the daddy of that one I killed.”

The night clicked and chimed around them so that it seemed as if they were standing in the belly of a ponderous clock, the hours timed not of this world and measured not by its ways.

“I’m sick,” Loat said. “I’m dying. The doctors say my kidneys are ruined. So I need one from you. I was aiming to get it out of Paul, but you damn sure put a stop to that.”

“You want one of my kidneys?” Beam asked. “That’s what all this had been about? All this killing had been on account of you not wanting to die?”

“What other reason is there for doing anything?” said Loat. “It’s why people steal, cheat, and rob. It’s why they fuck. Anything to make a stand against not being alive. When it comes your time, don’t act like you won’t be doing your damnedest to keep yourself in the world.”

“You think I’m just going to give you one of my kidneys?” Beam said.

Loat snorted. “I don’t think,” he said, “that you’ve got much of any say in it.”

“It’s my kidney. I reckon I say where it does or doesn’t go.”

“You just ain’t as quick as you ought to be.” Loat raised the gun. “This here is what does the only kind of saying that needs to get heard.”

“You shoot me and you won’t get any kidney.”

“That’s true. And don’t think I ain’t seen the itch in your step. You’re wanting to run. But if you do that, you better think of what I already done and what I can do to them you leave behind.” Loat
ran his tongue over his lips. “You better think what I can do to Derna.”

The trees shook and waved like brooms that would sweep the sky clear of stars and make of this a blacker night yet. Beam planted his feet in the firm dirt. He could go if he wanted. The woods were open. The thick and shadow-tangled world would hide him. But what world was there that could keep him for more than the respite of a few days? His body ached and his mind staggered dizzy with the thought of the horror his life had become, a horror so certain and absolute that it stood within him like the very frame of his bones. He saw how it was and how it would be. There was no earthly way to run. No earthly place worth running to. And there was Derna. She was old and worn and deserved whatever measure of peace he could give her in whatever hours remained to him.

Beam lifted himself from the hackberry log. He moved forward and Loat fell in behind him. They went slow under the trees, the moon dusting them with gray shadows as the elm saplings and sawbriers ripped at their clothes. They climbed through scrub brush and the surf of foam flowers and sedge and more Johnson grass until finally the crumbled shoulder of the road appeared where the trucker sat perched on a stray tire waiting for them with a wry and scant smile. Between his thighs sat Enoch. The trucker stroked the dog’s ears. “Now see, some take less time to climb a hill than others,” he announced. “But it’s not any trouble. I don’t mind waiting.”

Beam and Loat stared at him incredulously. “How’d you come out of that wreck so clean?” Loat asked. He and Beam were crooked and stove to varying degrees, yet the trucker seemed polished and showered.

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Well, it don’t matter,” Loat said. “Let’s just walk.” He whistled and Enoch sprang from the trucker’s grasp and followed at a trot as they all began to walk along the shoulder.

“Did you think you’d kill us all by wrecking my rig?” the trucker said to Beam.

“I think it’s a wonder somebody ain’t never loaded you with double-ought and throwed you down a hole somewhere. That’s what I think,” Beam answered.

“It wouldn’t work.”

“What wouldn’t?”