by Alex Taylor
She followed him. A brown boot lace hung from the ceiling fan, and Loat pulled it and light scattered over the chairs and Formica table spread with envelopes, prescription pill bottles, a few gnawed pieces of white bread, drill bits, and a jelly jar full of nails and ink pens. The strippings of a deer rifle lay across one of the table chairs, the barrel slick with fresh bluing, and a wire bore brush blackened from use lay on the floor. Flies droned everywhere.
Loat went to the faucet and ran water in a coffee cup. He brought it to Derna, and she held it with both her hands as if the room was cold and she expected the cup to warm her fingers.
“Drink that,” said Loat. “It’s good water.”
Derna held the cup to her nose and sniffed. “Used to not be,” she said. “I can remember when you could hold a match to what came out of that tap and it’d flame there was so much sulfur in the water.”
Loat smirked and scratched the small bud of his nose. “Not anymore,” he said. “I got some of those asshole magistrates to finally run a city pipe out here.” He pointed to the cup in her hands. “That is some of the best water dirty money can buy.”
Derna sniffed the cup again, then tipped it to her lips and drank. The water tasted warm and vaguely metallic and she held it in her mouth a long time before she swallowed.
“What’d I say? It drinks good, don’t it?” Loat smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s good.”
Loat pointed to an empty seat at the table. “Sit down,” he said. He lifted the deer rifle from the chair, placed it on the four-eye stove and then sat down himself.
Derna sat down at the table, stowing the cup of water in her lap. “I heard you’re sick,” she said.
Loat placed his hands on his knees and leaned toward her, his eyes hooded and cold as craters on the moon.
“People talk,” he said.
“Usually not without they got a reason to.”
“They don’t need a reason other than it gives them something to do with the air other than breathe it.”
Derna placed her cup on the table. “You aren’t well though, are you?”
“The one thing wrong with me,” said Loat, “is that I’m getting old.”
Derna leaned back in her chair and stared at Loat. His cheeks had grown sallow and lean, and a raggedy tremor clutched in his chest when he drew air as though his lungs were cluttered with trash.
“My kidneys are bad,” Loat finally said. “I can’t pass good water and when I do, I’m pissing blood.”
Derna pinched her fingers into a beak and poked them into the coffee cup, then dribbled some water over her wrist and worked it in until her skin felt damp. “It don’t matter none to me,” she said flatly.
“I know it don’t. But you didn’t come out here to ask questions about my health. You want to know about your boys.”
She looked at him. There were things she wished to say but she held her tongue. It felt like glue between her jaws, and what could she say, really? Too many things, she supposed. Curses and prayers. More questions that led down old nowhere paths to old nowhere ends. She’d lived with Loat for close to six years and in all that time she’d never known the man to allow talk to go any way he didn’t want it to. It was a strange power he held, and she felt it working on her now.
“Must be real hard on you,” he said. “Paul’s gone and now that other one Beam has lit out.” Loat put his chin against his chest and stared at her, his eyes softening a bit.
“What do you know about Beam?” she asked.
“I know what Clem told me the other night ain’t so. I know Beam ain’t just off tomcatting. He’s straight gone, ain’t he?”
Derna clinched her fists in her lap. “Clem says he’s just out on a drunk. But he’s been gone since Tuesday and he’s got that sleeping sickness.” She kneaded the dress in her lap, making biscuits like a cat. “Are you looking for him?” she asked.
Loat shook his head. “What would I want with Beam?” He sat back in his chair and stroked his cheeks. “Though it is some curious the way he just up and left so close to Paul winding up drowned in the river.”
Derna brought the cup to her lips and felt the cool porcelain as she sipped the last of the water down.
“Why did Clem lie to me the other night?” Loat asked. “Beam’s off tomcatting? If that’s the case, nobody’s seen him. So where’s he at?”
She felt him pulling her a way she did not want to go, his voice clinging to her like mud as it sucked her down.
“Did you kill Paul?” she managed to ask.
The question caught Loat off guard and his eyes roiled slightly before steadying.
“You’ve gone wrong asking that,” he said. “Why would I kill Paul? He was mine.”
“You’ve gotten rid of plenty that belonged to you.”
Loat clicked his tongue and swallowed. “Same could be said of you, I reckon.” He stood and went to a cabinet, where he took down a bottle of Lord Calvert. He poured some into a coffee mug and drank it, then poured himself another shot and turned to her.
“As I recall, you’re the one left Paul behind for me to raise,” he said.
Derna ticked her fingernail against the cold coffee cup on the table. She felt Loat leading her toward things she didn’t want to talk about, not with him, and she lurched a bit in her chair as she fumbled with her own thoughts. Outside, the wind tossed and wrapped itself about the house like a palsied hand hiding a candle flame, and the windows bucked and bowed with each gust.
“That’s a nice garden you got outside, Loat,” she said. “Why don’t you show it to me?”
Loat stared at her for a moment, then threw back the last drink of his whisky. He wheezed as the liquor bit through him. When the burn had passed, he wiped his lips on the back of his hand.
“Come on then,” he said, moving toward the door.
Loat picked some ripe squash, placing them in a blue plastic Wal-Mart sack.
“Deer eat most of what I grow,” he said, handing the sack to Derna. “I lay for them with my rifle in the mornings sometimes, but I’ve yet to fell a one.”
Derna held the sack of vegetables like a purse. The wind blew the garden’s loess against her ankles and she pinched her eyes against the hard sun, feeling the sweat as it leaked down her back. “I wish you’d look for Beam,” she said, staring at the woodline as if her lost boy might be hidden somewhere in the shady trees.
Loat stooped and yanked a morning glory vine from the soil and coiled it in his hands. “And why is that?” he asked.
She turned to him. “I’ve lost one son already, Loat,” she said. “I can’t bear losing the other.”
Loat snorted and snapped the morning glory vine in two. “Finding a pup with running blood ain’t my bag, Dollbaby. Especially one that don’t mean no more to me than the shit on my heels.”
“Then why’d you come by the house last night?”
“I wanted to give you the news about Paul. Sheriff said he’d run by and tell you and I guess he did, but I wanted you to hear it from me, too.”
The wind conjured Derna’s hair. She tried to smooth it down, but it leapt up beneath her hand and sprawled across her brow and into her eyes so that for a moment the image of Loat standing before her in the garden blurred and wavered.
“What’s Clem not telling me, Dollbaby?” he asked impatiently.
She used to tell him everything he wanted to know, sometimes before he even asked. She enjoyed being able to speak freely to a man about her secrets, usually while she lay sweating in the crook of his arm, smelling the humid aroma of whisky that clung to his skin.
But over time, all that changed. It began when Loat took to making her sleep alone on a twin bed in the far back of the house. “I can’t sleep good with no one in the bed beside me,” was his reason, and she believed him, even after his visits to her little room attained the air of a quick conjugal visit inside a prison. She believed him because he’d taken her away from that failing house in the mud hills where she
’d lived with her mother and two sisters, all of them bitter women with needle-sharp tongues, believed him because his body was lean and muscled as it slid into her own with all the calm easy sway and deceptive power of a river.
Then one day, she lifted herself from the bed in the back room, tried the door and found it locked. She stood with her hand on the cold brassy knob and pressed her shoulder into the scuffed unpainted wood, but there was no give to it. Turning to the window, she saw Loat lift a flat board to the bottom of the glass outside and begin nailing it flush against the house. The light slowly leaked from the room as she screamed.
“You’re not telling me everything I want to know, Dollbaby,” Loat yelled from outside after he’d finished nailing her in. “I’ve got to let you stay in here a few days until you get your mind right. You’re young and sometimes young girls like you need a little breaking down before they know how to deal right with their men.”
Now, he took her arm and slowly ran his callused palm through the crook of her elbow. She looked into his eyes, clear and precise as a hawk’s.
“Clem sent Beam away,” she said quickly. “He won’t say it, but I know that’s what he did.”
Loat went on stroking her arm. “How do you know?”
“He told you a lie about wrecking the ferry. It wasn’t him that did it. It was Beam.” The words came swiftly and without cease, and she could no more stop them than she could stop the sun from clocking through the sky. “Beam was running the ferry Tuesday night. He run it aground some way and when he come to the house to tell Clem, he looked bad scared and that’s the last I’ve seen of him. They left to go see about it and it was nearly daylight when Clem came in, but Beam wasn’t with him.”
“Where did Clem say he’d gone?”
“He didn’t. He just acted like Beam was in the house and like nothing unusual at all was going on. When I asked, he give me that line about Beam just going off on a drunk. Same line he handed you.”
Loat let his hand fall from her arm.
“You must not trust Clem awful much to come out here and tell me such things,” he said.
“I don’t trust anyone. I’m trying to find my son and you’re the only one can help me.”
Loat pursed his lips and drew a high wheezy breath through his nostrils. “It’s strange how them that go out to multiply got to then try and get back what they loosed in the world, ain’t it?”
“You don’t have to preach me a sermon, Loat.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “But stranger still is the way it’s come to be. You going up and down in the world trying to find your last born child when you didn’t want the first born.”
“I was just a child myself when I had Paul. You can’t hold a child guilty for being foolish.”
“I can hold all guilty. Man, woman, and child.”
“I was scared, Loat.”
“Scared of what?”
Derna looked at the ground. “You,” she said quietly.
“I guess you ain’t afraid no more? That why you’re standing out here in my garden?”
Derna raised her eyes to him. “I can’t afford to trust my fear,” she said. “I need my son back and I need you to help me find him.”
Loat shook his head quickly and then spat. “I don’t see that you got much to deal with, Dollbaby. You know I don’t do nothing without a price.”
Derna ran her thumb along the inside of her dress collar. Her gaze darted to the pale blue house seated beneath the pin oak trees, and then back to Loat’s hard beveled face.
“We could go back inside,” she said. “It’s lots cooler in the house.”
Loat grunted a small laugh and then pulled a shabby handkerchief from his back pocket, which he used to wipe his cheeks dry.
“Ain’t this something?” he remarked. “First you tell me I’m scary and now you’re flashing me them big ole eyes. What’s this about, Dollbaby?”
She slid a curl of hair behind her ear. “You done me bad, Loat,” she said in a near whisper. “But it weren’t all your fault. I know I done you some bad myself. I know you loved me a long time ago and I’m so sorry for the way I hurt you back then.”
She took a step closer to him and placed a hand on his arm. “I hurt you bad, didn’t I?” she said.
For a moment, something shifted in Loat’s eyes and Derna thought she might actually be about to regain a loose control over him. She slid her hand higher up his arm and felt his bicep flex at her touch.
“We should try and do good to each other,” she said. “Now that Paul’s gone.”
That was too much. At the mention of his son’s name, the fire rekindled in Loat’s eyes. He slid his arm around Derna’s waist and she smelled the bitter talc of his dentures and the soured whisky reek from the back of his throat. She tried to pull away, but it was too late as he led her out of the garden and through the yard onto the porch, her shoes echoing off the warped boards and then the closeness of the house enveloped her until she heard only the kitchen faucet dropping its one recurrent note against the metal sink, a sound as undaunted as blood and breath.
IX
THURSDAY
Beam had allowed sleep to fool him once again. It had come upon him just after the trucker pulled back onto the Natcher Road, and now he awoke in the rig’s cab, the strange man shaking his arm and chittering like a squirrel about dancing and cold beer. Beam opened his eyes and looked out the truck’s bug-smeared windshield at a large gravel parking lot framed by fields sown with heat-withered soybeans. A long Quonset hut with a rusted roof sat in the middle of the parking lot. Above the building’s oaken double doors hung a hand painted sign that read COLD BEER DANCING JUKEBOX AT DARYLS.
“Get up, Sleepy Head,” said the trucker. He shook him forcibly until Beam slapped the man’s hand away.
The trucker giggled. “A might touchy this evening, ain’t you?” He slouched with his back against the greasy driver’s side window. “Time to punch your ticket, bud.” He rested his hands on the grooved steering wheel and nodded toward the Quonset hut. “Now see, I’m fixing to go in here and drink them out of business. You’re welcome to come along, but you can’t stay in my rig.”
Beam clawed the sleep from his eyes. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said.
“No? And why not?”
“I know this bar. You go in there dressed like that, you’re liable to wind up drowned in somebody’s well.”
“My God, that sounds like one helluva goddamn place. What are the women like in there?”
“I tell you one thing,” Beam said, “the women in there ain’t seen a man wearing a suit since they shut the lid on their daddy’s caskets.”
“So you’re saying I’d be prime real estate for them.”
“Oh, sure,” said Beam. “They’d plow you like new ground.”
The trucker slapped the steering wheel. “Now see, that settles it then. I’m going in.” He opened the door and stepped down onto the truck’s running board, then turned to look back into the cab at Beam. “You can come along or sit out here in the sun, but you got to get out of my rig.”
Beam shook his head and then opened his door and climbed down into the burning white parking lot. He immediately began to sweat and could feel the heat stabbing up through the soles of his boots.
“Adios there, bud,” the trucker said, waving a hand.
Beam watched him walk to the hut, and when he opened the double doors, a brief jangle of steel music spilled out before they slammed shut again and only the buzzing hum of the day remained. He hitched the duffel onto his shoulder and thought about what to do.
Even if he hadn’t killed the man on the ferry, Beam knew that Daryl’s was no place for him to be. Someone might know him, and there was a stout chance the law would come snooping around due to a fight or some other business Beam had no involvement in. Though he had never been inside the bar, Beam knew that the proprietor, Daryl Vandlandingham, a double amputee and pusher of whores and prime stroke grass, was a ma
n who settled his accounts on his own terms, and those terms often involved blood. No, a better move would simply be to move on, to hitch a ride to another town. He had the twenty dollar bill he’d taken from the man on the ferry, plus the fifty his father had given him before he left, and that would last him a spell.
Beam took a few steps toward the highway and then stopped. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d fallen asleep in the rig and that anything might have happened while he dozed. He dropped the duffel onto the ground and squatted down beside it, rifling through the bundled clothing, searching for the Ziploc bag where he’d stowed the money. It was gone.
A thick rage boiled up inside him. He walked through the flailing heat to the bar and hurled the doors open. A blast of cool, fecund air smoothed over his face. When the doors closed at his back, he stood in a pulsing dim until his eyes adjusted and steadied.
The Quonset spanned long and narrow before him like a bowling lane. The floor was marked with a scuffed red varnish that had faded over time so that the wood now held a dull luster. A black painted bar spread the length of one wall. Behind it, bottles stood in their tiered ranks, whiskeys, vodkas, bourbons and gin demijohns spangling from a drape of milky light that spilled from a halogen tube hung above the gilt-framed mirror behind the bar. A few picnic tables papered with newsprint sat to his right, in front of a stage. Amplifiers and microphones lay bundled in a corner like shock fodder. In the center of the stage was a large four-poster bed with a velvet red canopy and fresh crimson linens and mauve pillows piled in thick drifts atop the mattress. A piebald billy goat stood tethered to one of the bed posts, nibbling steadily at the hem of one of the sheets. Neon signs for Falstaff and Falls City and Pabst drooled garish light down the walls. Picture frames displaying large panties and bloomers were tacked here and there like gallery art, and Beam stood wondering if there were really women with body enough to fill such copious drawers.
The trucker was nowhere, and the entire place seemed empty. A whorl of air came from a box fan sitting on the bar and Beam went and stood in the cool draft, letting the sweat dry on his cheeks. He propped a boot on the brass foot-rail and stared the length of the bar to where the hut narrowed to a long hallway of doors. The jukebox played low in the background, Gene Watson singing “Fourteen Carat Mind.”
