The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  “I don’t know,” he finally stammered. “I can’t read it.”

  The old man let him up. He stood back and his eyes jerked with nervy light. “Then you’ll eat it,” he said, taking the pieces of worm from the table and clamping Loat by the hair and yanking his head back to force his mouth open.

  Loat clutched his belly and thought of the worm. He wondered if it yet spiraled in his innards. Times came and he felt he could see to the very end, actually reach out and graze the downy cheek of the future. But those were days of rarity. Mostly, he wondered at how he’d lost his ciphering eye just as his father had, and if blindness was not a congenital failing of his blood.

  He took the bottle of Calvert from the dresser. It dangled from his hand like a dead fowl, the liquor sloshing inside. When he opened the door, his best hound was there, the one he alone tended to. It lifted its head from its paws and in the crystalline dark of the hall its eyes glowed like ironlode.

  “Enoch,” he said. The dog stood, wagging its tail nub. “Let’s walk.”

  The two of then went down the hall. Loat kept close to the wall, letting his free hand drag over the peeling oilpaper while the dog trotted behind like a vague canine ghost, ashy and gray in the shadows, until they emerged into the light of the bar. Suddenly, everywhere was the clink of glasses, the chisel of talk, the light through the windows withering down over the floor into the long jots of dust and gravel that had been tracked in from the parking lot. The jukebox played something nervous and stricken.

  Loat sat down at the bar with his bottle. The tender stood at the other end using a butter knife to prize gold fillings out of the teeth from the jar, scooping out handfuls of them and scattering them on the bar panel. When he looked up and saw Loat, he took a shot glass down from a shelf and brought it to him, then went back to his paring.

  Loat poured himself a shot of Calvert and sipped, petting the dog beside him, running his hand under its collar while the whisky flamed beneath his ribs. In the mirror, he studied the patrons. Mostly folks he knew, scabrous farmers and coal miners milling about like forms hacked out of shadows. An outcropping of the vagabonded and derelict.

  He tapped his glass against the bar and the tender came down to him.

  “Got something for Enoch?” Loat asked.

  The tender, a large man with a face fat and yellow as wax, nodded. He lifted up a metal gallon bucket of pickled eggs and sat it on the bar. Loat took two out, flung the brine off, and fed them to the dog, the greenish yolks crumbling onto the floor. The tender smiled and sat the bucket back behind the bar and returned to working the teeth.

  Loat turned to regard the crowd. Daryl, clearly drunk, sat on the bed on stage with the goat, its head resting in his lap. The suit-wearing trucker sat in a chair against the wall drinking a bottle of Falstaff. Tilting his head to catch a view of the cage of rafters above, the previous night came back to Loat, crawling up like a black spider from a sink drain. After Derna had left him, he’d received the call about Beam being here at the bar, but when he’d arrived the boy was gone. He spent most of the night looking for him. First to Pete Daugherty’s shack, but the place stood blank and lightless, the windows showing only the old man’s clutter, racks of magazines slouching on the floor and rungs of peppers hanging from the ceiling joists to dry. Then it was into Drakesboro, barreling full horse, coasting motel parking lots looking for Pete’s truck, but they had found nothing. Asking questions at the movie house, the restaurant and diesel station out on the parkway, but all the waitresses and vendors seemed beleaguered with ignorance, their jaws slack as they yanked popcorn from their hair or lit cigarettes under the dull marquee lights. Presto had gone back with the dogs to wait in the woods behind Pete’s shack, and that’s where he was now, but Loat knew it was a gamble that the old man would return anytime soon. He could lie out in the high weeds for weeks, living off creek water and grub worms, and as long as Beam stayed with him, he could do the same. Then just as suddenly, the two might be spotted in town drinking milkshakes at The Dairy Queen. It was that inconsistency, that inability to predict the old man’s next move, that made him so hard to track. Loat didn’t know if it was cunning or simple luck, but Pete had a way of shifting and shaping himself to fit any crack in the earth, sliding in quietly as water. The man was a wood witch, a healer. Loat had always kept his distance because of this, but when the sickness struck, he went to Pete for a fix because he was known to trade in such, but the healing didn’t take and now Loat fumed with hatred toward the old man and his quack medicine. And, to top it off, he’d commandeered Beam, pushing himself into business not his own. Whatever magic Pete might possess, Loat would make him use it.

  He turned back to his whisky. In the mirror, he watched Daryl cross the floor to the bar and come up beside him.

  “How’d Freda treat you?” he asked, swinging himself down onto a stool. The tender sat a bottle of Jax in front of him with a straw.

  “She’s got an old blowed out pussy.” Loat shook his head slowly and sipped his Calvert. “But I guess I can’t complain about what comes free.”

  Daryl smiled. “There are other girls not quite so broke in. You know you’re the one picked Freda.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “But then, maybe your mind is somewheres else.” Daryl leaned into his straw. “Maybe you’re thinking about somebody else.”

  Loat dipped a finger into his whisky and sucked it dry. “I don’t think about women,” he said.

  “You don’t?”

  “I never understood men that thought too much about them. Women are like freight trains. Every ten minutes another one comes down the line.” He raised his glass and clinked it against Daryl’s beer. “Freight trains,” he said, throwing the rest of the shot back.

  “What have the doctors told to you?” Daryl asked.

  Loat turned the shot glass upside down and rested his hand on it. “A year,” he said. “That’s how long I go without something gets done. It’s in the early stages so I can still fuck. I just can’t hardly piss and my blood is getting bad. They wanted to put me on that dialysis, but I told them to kiss my ass.”

  Daryl suckled his beer. “It had to have been Beam that killed him,” he said after a spell. “After what Derna told you about Beam being the one to wreck the ferry and Paul winding up drowned like that, there’s no way it could’ve have been anybody but Beam.”

  Loat folded his hands and propped his chin on his knuckles. “I know that.”

  “But you can’t figure out why, can you?”

  “I’m not trying to figure on the why of it. What I care about is finding him. He’s put me to death, killing Paul. I aim to do the same for him.” Loat turned on his stool and looked out across the floor. A few couples were dancing, the women smearing their makeup on their men’s shirtsleeves while the music brayed. Against the far wall, the trucker in the suit leaned in his chair. A beer bottle poked from his breast pocket. His hair drooped oiled and sloppy into his eyes. “That trucker there is making himself at home, ain’t he?”

  Daryl watched the mirror. “Claims he wants to dress you,” he said.

  “Dress me?”

  “In a suit. Thinks he’s some kind of tailor. Got a load of fancy clothes in his rig. Says you’re the kind of man that needs sharpening with slacks and a blazer.”

  Loat poured another shot and drank it down quickly. “Only man I’ll ever let dress me is the undertaker.”

  “I’ve told him as much.”

  Loat placed the empty shot glass on top of the bottle of Lord Calvert. Then he stood and stretched himself, the blear of the whisky making the room tilt and sway.

  “Know what else he claims?”

  Loat balanced himself with a hand on the bar.

  “He claims,” said Daryl, “that if we find a kidney, he can do the surgery. Calls himself a night doctor.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Says he learned it in the service.” He turned and looked at the trucker leaning in his chair, the bottl
e of Falstaff sprouting from his breast pocket like a boutonnière. “If he can do it, that’d save us trying to squeeze one of these county doctors. I know you don’t trust doctors no way.”

  “What makes you think I’d trust some truck driver wearing a suit?”

  “It’s your general disposition.”

  “Is that so?”

  Daryl licked his teeth. “You’ve not heard this feller talk on life and the wide straying ways of it. He’s a silver tongue.”

  “That don’t mean he’s worth a damn as a sawbones.”

  “No. But he’s your kind. Believe me.”

  Loat spread his hands out on the bar. “I’d have to see some evidence that he knows what the hell he’s doing before I let him cut on me.” He patted the wood, his nails scratching the varnish. “I don’t think he can do that.”

  Daryl shrugged. “You get your back to the wall, you might be about ready to try anything.”

  “I ain’t even thinking on getting a kidney now.”

  “On account of Paul getting killed?”

  “It has to come from blood,” Loat said. “When Paul turned up dead I knew that was it. It don’t matter now what kind of dirt I’ve got on any of these county doctors because Paul was it, he was bringing it to me, carrying my life with him. No way in hell I’m going to the county clinic to get on one of those fucking waitlists like every other cocksucker that’s dying and get some piece off a somebody I don’t even know. Hell, they might even give me a nigger kidney.”

  Daryl giggled, his squat form jouncing on the bar stool. “It’s got to come from blood? What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It’s what I believe.”

  “What you believe?”

  Loat nodded. “Blood is the only thing you can count on.” He straightened his hat in the bar mirror. “There ain’t nothing else. Not where I’m coming from. It’s blood or it’s nothing. Money, women, land—none of that don’t add up to anything close to righting a man or giving him what he needs.”

  “You sound like you been reading the Bible too much,” Daryl said.

  “What’s the Bible? It’s a book some crazy fool wrote because he was scared to death of dying. Of not being no more. What I’m talking about is older than the Bible. What I’m talking about will still be around when the Bible has been forgot and throwed away.”

  Loat took his hands from the bar and scraped them over his cheeks, feeling the bones under his thinned flesh. Already, the sickness had pared him down, winding its blind path through his body, chiseling his days away. For most of his life, he’d simply accepted death as an eventual given, but now that its certainty stared him flush in the eye, he found himself checking the mirror more often, as if to gauge how much ground he was losing.

  “What do you think Clem cares about any of this?” Daryl asked.

  Loat looked away from the mirror. “Who knows,” he said. “Clem’s the one sent Beam off once he’d killed Paul, so you’d think he’s got a spot in his heart for the little sonuvabitch. Almost have to after raising him like his own. Course, he could’ve been just looking out for his own ass. Why you ask?”

  “No reason,” Daryl grunted. “Just curious some.”

  Loat leaned in close and put his hand hard on the back of Daryl’s neck. “You think on something else,” he said softly. “I don’t want nobody worrying about Clem. I know you been wanting to even the score since he rolled those bad dice out at the mines, but he don’t matter right now. You think on getting Beam.” He released Daryl’s neck.

  “You always keeping Clem safe,” Daryl said, turning his head slightly to flex away the pain from Loat’s grip had left. “Why is that?”

  “I like to keep all my tools handy.”

  “I believe Clem is one that’s worn out his use.”

  “Could be,” Loat said. He turned and looked at the crowd in the mirror behind him, his eyes settling on the trucker, who sat propped against the wall in his chair, his greasy hair slung over his head. “I’ll be damned if that sumbitch trucker don’t look like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

  Daryl half turned on his stool and looked across the bar at the stranger in the tailored suit. The man’s face was gaunt and famished, the lean cheeks and damp curls of his hair making him seem like a fop fallen on hard times. But his eyes seemed to burn as if something hellish cooked inside them, and a faint sneer rode his lips.

  “By God, he does look like Jerry Lee, don’t he,” said Daryl, laughing.

  “The Killer,” said Loat, shaking his head. He laughed, then pushed himself away from the bar. “I need some air after hearing that Jerry Lee Lewis wants to be my tailor.” He turned and strode outside, where the sun flared and raked over the white gravel lot.

  He was standing beneath the door eaves in what shade they gave when Clem came walking up in the strong heat.

  “I didn’t look for you to come out this way,” Loat said.

  “I guess it ain’t like me.”

  “Not usually. What finally brought you round?”

  “I’m looking for Beam,” Clem said. Loat noticed that his hands were trembling at his sides, and his eyes were squinty and bloodshot.

  “Beam’s not here,” Loat answered. “Though you probably want me to take you inside and show you every room just so you know I’m telling the truth. I understand that, so I won’t take it as an insult. You thinking I’m a liar, I mean.” Loat picked absently at a thread on his pants. “But I don’t believe you want to go in there.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Loat jerked his head at the double doors. “Daryl will have you laid out like a side of beef if you set foot inside.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I come here to find Beam.” Clem made to open the doors, but Loat stepped in front of him.

  “I’m telling you something right now. If you go inside, there won’t be enough left of you to spread on a piece of light bread. Go on back to Derna. She needs you more’n Beam does.” Loat put his hand on Clem’s shoulder and squeezed it softly. “Go home, Clem. You can’t do no good out here.”

  Clem looked down at Loat’s fingers lying on his shoulder, the flesh browned and scabbed, the nails yellowed and cracked as old teeth.

  “I want to know something,” he said, raising his eyes to meet Loat’s. “I want to know why you gave me those bad dice to roll with Daryl out at the mines. I want to know why you’re always protecting me.”

  Loat took his hand from Clem’s shoulder, then flexed his jaw and spat. “I could ask why both you and Daryl were always so eager to do what I said.”

  “You’d have killed us if we did otherwise.”

  “That’s likely so.”

  “Why give me those bad dice, then? Why even have us roll at all? Why do it that way when you could’ve just told Daryl to monkey up that power pole?”

  The wind shuffled bits of trash over the parking lot, a few paper cups and beer bottles tinkling against the gravel.

  “Then it’d be me he’d be looking to kill,” Loat said. “Not you.”

  Clem’s eyes squirmed like a pair of slugs doused with salt. “How do you know I ain’t told Daryl about those dice? How you know I ain’t told him everything?”

  “You spook too easy, Clem. That’s how I know. I could say boo right now and you’d scamper back to Derna.” He placed his hand on Clem’s shoulder again. “I don’t have to worry about you breathing a word to Daryl because if that was going to happen it already would have by now. All that you’re going to do is turn around and go home.”

  Clem stepped back, and Loat’s hand fell from his shoulder. His eyes jumped a little, a cold light flaring in them, and his breath shortened as if he were on the verge of vomiting. “You’re looking for Beam,” he said.

  “So are you,” said Loat. “Which means what you told me the other night about Beam just being off tomcatting was a lie.”

  Clem slid his hand to his pocket, hooking a finger in his belt. Behind the Quonset hut doors, the noise of the bar scuffled, making a dull quiver like
distant thunder.

  “What do you want with Beam?” Clem asked. “He’s never done anything to you.”

  Loat spat into the dust. “If he ain’t done nothing to me, then there’s nothing for him to worry about,” he said. “Only, you and I both know that’s not the way it is, is it? There wouldn’t be a need for Beam to hide if he hadn’t done something. Maybe what he’s done is the worst thing he could do. That’d sure give a man reason to run for cover.”

  Clem’s eyes widened. He took another step back from Loat, his boots scratching in the gravel lot. He seemed to be waiting, drawing the moment out, as if he thought it might come to an end other than the way he’d expected.

  “Go home, Clem,” Loat said. “There’s nothing left for you here.”

  A warm breeze startled the grass in the ditches and turned up the white underneathes of the tree leaves. In the spread of fields across the road, dust coiled and spun in evanescent volutes and the air held a loud smell of rain.

  Clem fixed his eyes on the ground and seemed almost about to leave when he suddenly shoved past Loat and opened the Quonset hut’s two oaken doors and disappeared inside, the bar noise cutting sudden through the day like brash weather.

  Loat stood there for a few seconds, then turned and went inside to the trouble that was beginning.

  XV

  FRIDAY

  They followed the drive, a lane of washed out river rock, the ruts clotted with mud and gashes of ochre glaur, and then crossed a crude bridge where a brook needled away beneath sumac and elder trees. The house sat small beneath maples and pawpaws and a smell of damp and rotted wood lingered in the air. A rusted burnbarrel smoked grayly beside the porch, which was cluttered with several kinds of footwear: tromping boots and loafers of cracked leather, even a few pairs of women’s slippers, all piled against the hickory railings. Squirrel hides dangled from nails driven into the porch’s support posts. Beyond the house was a spread of outbuildings, all succumbing to varying degrees of ruin, and past their mired sprawl was the garden where corn and beans and volunteer cane grew in long green currents.