The Marble Orchard (32 page)

The tender walked down to him.

“Old Milwaukee,” Elvis said.

The tender dragged a can from the icebox. He popped it with a filet knife and placed it in front of Elvis.

Elvis took two long sips. The beer tasted germy, like moldy bread, but it was cold.

“It’s two dollars. Start a tab?” the tender asked.

Elvis swallowed and shook his head. He reached in his pocket and took out eight quarters, placing them in a careful stack on the bar.

The tender scooted the money into his palm and knocked the register open and slid the coins inside. The tin sale bell chimed when he slammed the cash drawer closed.

“Strange for somebody to pay in quarters.”

Elvis turned. Daryl stood before him. He’d lost weight and his eyes were sunken. Elvis scooted a stool out with his boot. He waited for Daryl to stow himself down, but he just stood there, armless and strange in a camo vest and t-shirt and pleated khakis. The tops of his loafers gleamed like fresh tar.

“I’m all pocket change,” Elvis said. He tapped the stool with his boot. “Sit down.”

Daryl lowered himself onto the red cracked vinyl seat. The tender brought him a bottle of Jax with a bendy straw. He sipped and turned his head and wiped his mouth against his shoulder. “What do you want?” he asked. “You come in here like this, I know you want something so you best go ahead and say what it is.”

“Why? You in a hurry?”

“No. But the way you’re dressed don’t make anybody want to dance.”

Elvis leaned over his beer and ran his thumbnail over the sharp aluminum edge of the mouth of the can.

“I ain’t seen Loat,” Daryl said. “It’s the same today like it’s always going to be. I ain’t seen him.”

Elvis lifted the can and took a pull. “What about Beam?”

Daryl shook his head. “My guess, he’s probably taking turns with Chicago whores and eating rainbow pie.” He drew himself closer to Elvis. “My advice would be to stop your looking. I can tell right now it ain’t helping your age none.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Elvis said. “But you don’t mind me coming in here once a week and having a brew. Long as I’m paying, I can drink my beer, right?”

Daryl stiffened. He rose straight and pulled away from Elvis, then leaned down over the straw sprouting from the bottle of Jax and slurped. “I don’t guess I got any say in that, do I?” he said.

Elvis wrapped his fingers around his can of Old Milwaukee. “What about that trucker,” he asked. “Where’s he gone off to?”

Daryl squinted. “There’s a lot of truckers in the world.”

“You know the one I mean.”

Daryl tilted his head back. The whiskers on his throat were silver. “If you mean that one that you had a run in with then I can’t say. I guess he had to head out for another run somewhere. You know how truckers are. They ain’t got no place.”

“Well, if he lit out he didn’t go in the rig he come in. You know that. We found the wreck. Matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet that you know exactly what become of him. Matter of fact, I’d say he had a good portion of help from you in getting wherever it is he’s gone to.”

Daryl lowered himself over the straw again and sipped. “You know how those folks are,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole world’s their home.”

Elvis chewed his lower lip. The bar noise groaned around him, a thick toneless scuffle of glasses and juke music and laughter and gnawed bits of drunken talk. Dusky light bled from the light
bulbs in the ceiling and the shadows of the dancers withered over the bright polished floor, the smoke buckling and settling in their wake.

“The whole world and nowhere,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Daryl continued, in mock comfort. “Folks like you and me, we’re lucky. We got our places. We ain’t like the trucker. We notched us out a groove a long time ago and now all we got to do is sit in it. You realize that and I’d say you’ll sleep lots better.”

Elvis tugged the last of his beer down. He sat the can on the bar and turned to Daryl. “Don’t you ever think I’m like you,” he said. “Me and you, we don’t come from the same place at all.”

Daryl grinned. “Tell yourself that then,” he said. “If that’s what keeps your nightmares away.”

“Nightmares.” Elvis grunted. “You’re looking at your nightmare right here.” He scooted closer and grabbed the front of Daryl’s vest, bunching the lapels in his fists. “I know you had a hand in all that mess with Beam,” he said. “I can’t prove it, but I know it. So you can sit up here the rest of your life sipping beer and playing at being some kind of country kingpin and I’ll be in here once a week to drink my Old Milwaukee and ask my questions. So you best be about finding your own way of getting to sleep and not worry about how I get mine.”

He let go of Daryl’s vest and made for the door.

“Where you going?” Daryl called after him.

“To look for Beam.”

“You ain’t gonna find him.”

Elvis paused with his hand on the door handle. Then he shook his head and stepped outside into the gusting winter air. He let his eyes adjust to the gray light and then walked to the cruiser. He took his hat off and laid it on the seat beside him and cranked the engine and drove away.

A wet snow began to spit. He clicked the wipers on. The country he drove through was a dingy worn trouble of hollers
junked with burned trailers and washing machines and wrecked vehicles, chambers of jagged black trees and wide pasture where snow jotted in the fescue a strange haunted script of ghosts. Elvis thought of the word
lazaretto.
He’d heard it on the vocabulary tape his sister had sent him. Another useless hobby, something she’d hoped would use his time. He remembered the sentence, the tape’s narrator breathing it out long and coolly, as if he spoke in a plush library amidst towers of leather bound books:
Those with cholera were taken to the lazaretto
. The word seemed to fit the land. Trees darkened by winter, the hills slinking down to the soggy bottom country—these were wards where the people were afflicted with night-mired souls, where the derelict and bereft were quarantined. It was a keep.

He drove on. On a blank stretch of road, he came to a green highway sign that marked the end of the county. There was a grimed turn-off and he pulled in, the tires snarling in the gravel. He shut the cruiser down. Sided by rearing hills, this was a place where the light slid down in short dim wisps the color of suturing thread, but he could not say what wounds the light mended, what flows it hoped to stanch. There were only hills and road, yawning out and going off into the further wilds. He could not imagine anyone coming to this place. There were only those being kept and those that left, either in flight or exile. He did not know which one he was, or even which he hoped to be, and he could not have said if there was less courage in being kept in a place, bound to a bitter soil and a bitter people, than in leaving it.

He rolled the window down and the cold bit his face. A fence ran alongside the road and the wind twanged the strands of rusted wire. A kestrel had perched itself on one of the locust posts, the wind ruffling its feathers. It sat in complete stillness, like a hawk fashioned from substances older than blood and flesh, its polished black eyes watching him with a stillness that was beyond the mere absence of motion, but seemed to contain all the fixed clarity of the end of time’s long unfurling, a stillness
that was depthless and unreadable and without governor. Elvis did not know what seeing a hawk in such weather meant, but he knew that it did mean something. Or, at least that it had once meant something. He tried hard to recollect his grandmother’s naming of birdly omens, but couldn’t. There was no knowledge to the thing at all anymore. No wisdom. Only the kestrel, sitting quiet on a locust post while the snow lay down in silence against the cold waiting earth.

He ran his hand through his hair. The rearview mirror was there for him to look into, but he did not look.

When he turned the ignition, the kestrel rose and swam up through the graying winter light. A thing that could not be kept. What the world could not ensnare.

“Best of luck to you,” Elvis whispered.

But the bird had already flown and he might as well have spoken only to the air.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the expertise of Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson of Ig Publishing, and as well as the dedication of his agent Terra Chalberg.