The Marble Orchard (6 page)

The man who’d spoken snuffled and drew a sleeve under his nose. His friend, features honed like a hatchet blade, put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his boot heels. “You know who it is, don’t you?” he asked.

Elvis flipped the steno pad open, holding the white page under his hat out of the rain. “No. Do you?”

“Course. That’s Paul Duncan. The one stole that car and hit that Cliver lady about ten years back. The same one busted out of Eddyville a few days ago.” The man drained his coffee cup and swallowed. “That’s Loat’s boy.”

III

WEDNESDAY

From his porch, Loat watched the cruiser slip under the awning of hackberry boughs and then climb the slight rise of his driveway, rocking over the washed out ruts in the gravel before it came to a stop in the muddy yard. He held a neon orange hardhat in his lap and sat spooning soggy cornflakes out of it, milk slipping off his chin onto the porch boards. As the sheriff and two state troopers came through the yard, he stowed the makeshift cereal bowl under his chair, folded his hands over his belly and snorted. Behind him, Presto Geary came through the screen door. His weight made the wooden floor groan, and Loat smelled his stink, a mixture of underarm and motor oil.

“What do they want?” Presto asked.

Loat leaned back in the nylon camp chair he was sitting in. “Same thing they been wanting all week, I’d guess,” he said.

Elvis and the two officers crossed through the yard’s scant grass. When they reached the porch, the sheriff put a boot on the bottom step and looked up at Loat and Presto as they were paired under the slanted roof of the house with its peeling blue paint, their faces creased and turned by the early gray light to a hard bruised color.

“Morning,” said Loat.

Elvis nodded, then gestured to the men behind him. “Loat, this is Officer Donaldson and Officer Pretshue,” he said. “State boys.”

“I can see what kind of uniforms they’re wearing.” Loat wiped a hand over his mouth and snorted again. “Y’all come looking for
that one you lost out of Eddyville, the story’s same now as it’s ever going to be. He’s not been here and I ain’t heard a thing from him.”

Elvis scraped the water from his cheeks and dried his hand against his trousers. “We think we found him,” he said. “In the river.”

Loat leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. His light gray hair was spackled like grout to his forehead and he brushed it back over his scalp and sat drawing thin breaths through the tiny slits of his nostrils. Many had remarked on the smallness of his nose, which was no more than a pink bump beneath his putty-colored eyes, and at times it caused his breath to emit a high adenoidal whistle that sounded like the grate and squeak of old water piping. Now, as he sat staring at the sheriff, his nostrils dilated and flexed as if he’d caught the aroma of something unpleasant in the air.

“You think you found Paul?” he asked.

Elvis nodded. “Just this morning.” He rested a hand on the stoop railing, the sleeve of his poncho dripping strings of water over the wet footstones.

With his poncho and flushed cheeks, Loat thought the man resembled a shrink-wrapped cut of butcher’s work. “Y’all come on up here out of the weather,” he said. “Then you can tell me the rest of it.”

Elvis moved on up the stoop and the two troopers followed and they all clustered under the eaves. The water dripping from them made a dark halo on the porch boards.

Loat studied the troopers closely, as he’d not seen either of them before. The one named Donaldson was older and once on the porch he lit a cigarette and stood smoking, his rheumy eyes watching the rain spit and shatter in the yard weeds. He seemed almost drowsy, and Loat figured him not far from retirement. Pretshue was younger and kept staring at Loat as if in direct challenge, his chapped lips pressed tightly against his teeth,
which Loat imagined were quite straight and white. He pictured the man with all his teeth smashed out by a ball-peen hammer, his mouth only a bleeding hole, and winked at him. The trooper blinked and his lips jerked oddly before he composed himself and resumed his staring.

“Say you found Paul?” Loat asked, turning to Elvis.

Elvis nodded. “We need you to come down to the morgue, make an I.D. on the body.”

Loat resettled the hardhat in his lap and looked at the three policemen. Wrapped in their plastic raingear, they appeared hapless and bungling, and he felt a bit embarrassed for them. Especially Elvis, whom Loat had known for years, ever since his election to county sheriff. He’d always struck Loat as a dainty kind of fellow not suited for the rough work of law enforcement.

Whatever shame he felt for these lawmen and their ineptitude soon grew into ripe disgust, though, and he raised his leg and let a long loose fart ripple out.

The lawmen gazed at him in mute shock. None of them moved or spoke.

“You hear something?” Loat said, turning to Presto, who was leaning against the front door of the house with his arms folded over his chest. Presto’s wide gray lips broke into a flabby grin and he slowly swayed back and forth, scratching his back against the wooden doorframe.

Loat turned back to the lawmen. “I believe I heard something,” he said. Again, he farted, the bottom of the camp chair flapping beneath him. “There it went again,” he said, in mock surprise. “What the hell is that?” He looked about him as if searching for the source of the noise and then put his eyes back on the lawmen. “Whatever it is, it stinks,” he said.

“Smells like genuine pig shit, don’t it?” said Presto.

“I believe you’re right,” Loat said, staring coldly at the three men. “I believe there’s been a few pigs rooting around and shitting on the place here lately.”

Elvis took a step back and rested his hands on his hips. Donaldson and Pretshue exchanged brief glances until Pretshue came forward, slinging his poncho aside so that Loat could see the revolver that rode his hip. “Listen,” he said, “if all you’re going to do is sit up here and fart all day then we need to be getting on. But if you want to come to town and identify the body of your son, then we’ll give you a ride.”

Loat stared at Pretshue. His cheeks were ashen, which likely meant he was afraid, but Loat knew he was also young enough to call the fear something else and not recognize it for what it truly was, and this made him dangerous. Paul had had the same careless streak in him. If tempered by age and circumstance, Loat knew it made a man into a lethal being who strode over the earth at will and brooked no compromise because none was required. Left unchecked, it usually led one down a dim path of ruin.

“I bet you still remember what your mama’s titty tastes like, don’t you?” Loat said.

Pretshue’s spine straightened as if he’d just be struck in the face. His cheeks flushed and he was about to offer some kind of retort when Donaldson stepped forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Go easy on us, Loat,” the older man said. “We ain’t here to arrest you. All we want is you to come down to the morgue and tell us whether or not it’s your son we pulled out of the river.”

Loat sighed and placed the hardhat beneath his chair once more. Then he stood and brushed the front of his shirt and looked past the men at the rain.

“Do you want a poncho?” Elvis asked.

Loat looked at the sheriff as if he were a bit touched. “I don’t mind getting wet,” he said. He turned to Presto standing behind him. “Mind the dogs,” he said. Then he walked down the stoop and out into the rain, moving through the muddy yard toward the idling cruiser, Elvis and the two troopers following behind him.

IV

WEDNESDAY

They woke late to the baying of hounds in the nighttime. The howls of the dogs rolled against the windows, then fled down the chimney, ceaseless and somehow resolute against the darkness through which they came until the sound seemed to have neither source nor limit but grew to be the very rage and roar of the night itself.

When Clem looked out the bedroom window, one finger pulling at a gauzy curtain, he saw the pale blue Cadillac parked in the yard and his chest tightened.

“What is it?” Derna asked.

He turned to her. In the blank moonlight filtering through the curtains her hair sprawled scalloped and silver on the pillow beneath her head. He knew she hadn’t slept. Since bedding down, he’d been awake himself, listening as she wept quietly beside him. The sheriff had been by that afternoon to deliver the news of Paul’s body being found in the river and she’d waited until sundown to begin mourning. Her people were ruddy Irish and Dutch stock and they retained customs such as that, believing it improper to shed tears for the dead in daylight.

“It’s where I figured him to wind up,” she’d said when Elvis brought her the news, her eyes stern and dry. Now she sniffled and wiped her face with the backs of her hands, and Clem reckoned all women strange and beyond his understanding. She had not seen Paul since he was a toddler and but for a slight written correspondence they’d exchanged in the past few years, had had no dealings with him at all. Yet here she was crying over him.

“What is it out there?” she asked again.

“It’s Loat,” Clem said. “We knew he’d come.” He bent down and picked his jeans up off the floor and pulled them on, then took the .32 snubnose from the bedside drawer. He left the room shirtless, and kept the lights off as he went through the house. When he reached the front door, he placed his forehead against it. The hounds had bounded onto the porch, their claws scraping at the wooden boards.

“Loat,” Clem called, and the dogs went quiet. “Loat, I’m here. What do you want?”

A dizzying silence. Behind him, Derna crept to the edge of the hallway, the dry cracked heels of her bare feet scuffling through the dirt on the hardwood floor.

Clem heard a click and when he turned, he saw she cradled his twelve gauge pump-action Mossberg.

“He won’t talk unless you open that door,” she said.

Clem nodded at the gun in her hands. “What you aim to do with that bear killer?”

She shook her head and the gray sleep-kinked curls of her hair swung around her face, casting erratic shadows over her cheeks. “When something like Loat comes in my yard, I want to be ready,” she said.

Clem was accustomed to this from his wife. A vein of stone filled the cleft in her soul and through that rough obdurate part of her there was no path that led to softer footing.

He turned back to the door and placed his hand on the cold brass knob. “I’m going to open this door Loat,” he said loudly. “I don’t want nothing to happen unless it has to.” Clem opened the door a crack. “Loat,” he said.

Someone whistled and the dogs bounded from the porch into the yard. Clem watched them scuttle to the Cadillac and then settle in the grass beside it, a half-dozen Dobermans, their sleek coats glinting in the moonlight.

“I’m right here,” said Loat.

Clem made him out. He was leaned against the grille of the
Cadillac, the dogs seated before him. He wore his straw hat and the moonlight spilled from the brim and onto his chest before dripping into the flecked tweedy lawn. He was bare-armed in a sleeveless shirt, tall and splay-legged and thin, all of him as skeletal and illusory as a scarecrow.

“Come on out here on your porch, Clem,” he said.

Clem opened the door and stepped onto the boards, keeping the pistol hidden behind his thigh. Squinting from beneath the eaves, he saw another man stood beside Loat. That would be Presto Geary, Loat’s driver. He was a large man, his head naked and bald as polished marble, and in his belt rode a pair of .44 hog leg pistols.

“Wake you up?” Loat asked.

“I’d say so.” Clem stretched and feigned a yawn.

“Well, it’s not many folks left that keep the hours I do.” Loat jerked his chin and Presto passed him a cigarette. The flame of a match scurried out of the dark, briefly lighting Loat’s cheeks and nose until he waved it out. “And besides,” he said, “you know me. I like to get out and ride around after a rain when the sky’s cleared off.” He raised a hand and pointed toward the moon where it hung in the sky like a white ring of bone. “Let’s me breathe better,” he said.

Clem laid his pistol on the porch railing. “What do you want?” he asked.

Loat drew on his cigarette. “Heard tell my boy’s gone.”

“Which boy would that be?”

“Don’t act ignorant.”

Clem spat into the grass growing beside the porch steps. “Paul never was your boy,” he said. “All you ever done was run him off when he got to working on your nerves. He got more raising from the drunks and whores out at Daryl’s than he ever did from you.”

Loat thumped his cigarette into the yard, the orange tip tracing through the dark before it shattered in the grass. “I didn’t come out here to get a lesson on daddying from you,” he said.
“Paul was mine by blood and I did a damn sight more for him than Derna ever did.”

“Well, it don’t matter one way or the other now,” said Clem. “He’s gone and that’s all there is to it.”

Loat propped a boot on the Cadillac’s front fender and folded his arms over his chest. “Who did it?” he asked.

Clem shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you.”

“He was bringing me something.”

Clem picked a few splinters from the porch railing and flung them into the yard. He stared at Loat where he stood in the full moonlight. He’d make an easy target, and doubtless knew this, but Clem could tell the man was unafraid and that whatever fear there was in the night stood with him underneath the porch eaves. “Derna ain’t heard nothing out of him going on three years,” he said. “Elvis and those state boys been coming by this week, ever since Paul walked off the yard down there at Eddyville, but we hadn’t heard a peep out of him. That suited me just fine. I never did want to know nothing about Paul. Whatever kind of souvenir or good luck charm he was bringing you, I don’t want to know nothing about that neither.”