The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  Quiet settled among them briefly as they listened to the trees clawing the roof. “What are we going to do?” Ella finally asked.

  Pete continued to stroke the stock of his rifle. “If we can hold on until daylight maybe he’ll give and leave. He’s parked in the moonlight so I might could peg him if I got to.”

  “We need to call somebody,” Ella said.

  “And who might that be?”

  “The sheriff.”

  Pete grunted. “Of course. Crawl over to the phone there and see if the line ain’t been cut. But I can tell you now, Presto has already done thought that.”

  “Maybe he forgot.”

  “Go on then, try the phone.”

  Ella stared at her father seated against the edge of the sofa. Then she rose up and ran to the phone and pulled it from its cradle, but only empty air whirred in her ear. She fingered the rotary, but no tone came.

  “It’s dead,” she whispered.

  “I know,” said Pete. “Now get down and don’t get up again.”

  She lay down beside Beam again, her face in the carpet, her arms wrapped over her head, her shoulders shivering as she began to cry. Beam reached out and touched her, but she jerked away and he drew his hand back as if it had been kissed by fire.

  From outside, they heard the sound of Presto slashing their tires.

  Beam drew himself up into a crouch and eased his back against the wall. The hiss of the leaking tires snaked long and thin, and his sweat draped over him coldly. The blinds rattling in the broken front window tinkled eerily. Ella was beside him on the floor, and Pete was crouched beneath the sofa with his Springfield, and none of this was their fault. They’d only tried to help him. He had asked for none of it, yet they had both given freely of themselves. He wondered what it was that made folks behave in such a way.

  “Let me go on out there,” he said. “He’ll take me and the two of you won’t have to be in this anymore.”

  “We’re in it already,” said Pete, shaking his head.

  “You don’t have to be. I can walk out that door and it’ll all be over for you.”

  “It don’t work like that, Beam. This ain’t the kind of thing a man can be over and done with.”

  Beam looked down at Ella. She had turned on her side, and her eyes bit at him through the moonlight. “Let him go,” she said coldly. “It’s the only way we’ll ever get out of this.”

  “You want to let him go?” asked Pete.

  “He wants to,” she said. “We might as well let him.”

  Beam felt something twist inside him at the sound of her voice and at the sound of what she had said. He thought of all the movies he’d seen at the two-screen cinema in Drakesboro where the departing hero was wept over by a bosomy maiden who couldn’t bear the heartbreak of losing him. Beam knew he wasn’t any hero and he knew this wasn’t any movie, but it pained him to hear Ella’s bluntness.

  “You sure you want to go, Beam?” Pete asked. “You don’t have to.”

  “I think I need to,” he answered.

  Pete studied him for a moment, then slowly crawled to a chest of drawers sitting beside the television. He opened the bottom drawer and took out a tarnished pistol, its silver plated barrel stained with powder burns.

  “This is a Walther .380,” he said. “Do you know how to use it?”

  Beam nodded.

  “It’s got six cartridges in the clip.” Pete pushed the release and held the clip in his palm, then snicked it back flush into the gun. “Take it.”

  Beam took the gun. He felt a brief glow of warmth, but then he saw Ella, and the way she stared at him from her spot on the floor, and the warmth drifted away. She wanted him to go.

  “Can you do this, Beam?” Pete asked. The old man peered at him through the shadows, and Beam was about to say yes, he could do it, when one of the hounds crashed through the broken front window. Pete only had time to half turn before the dog disentangled itself from the blinds and leapt at him. It ripped its fangs over his throat so the blood gushed sudden and all at once and the Springfield clattered useless at his feet as Pete staggered and then fell to the floor with the dog on top of him snarling and heaving, the quick ratchets of its teeth clicking against his neck bones.

  Beam tried to slide a round into the chamber of the Walther, but it was an old weapon and hard to prime, its barrel crusted with burned cordite. Ella screamed at him to shoot the dog, but his fingers were sweaty and he fumbled and dropped the pistol and then picked it up and managed to slide a round into the chamber and he fired twice and the shots sent the dog sprawling against the door where it seized and then died in the endlessness of its own blood.

  Pete lay motionless on his back. He wore a collar of gore, and his eyes pooled like milk in his head. He gave a small whine of breath, and then he was gone. Ella fell over him, her face smeared with his blood as great sobs pulsed out of her.

  Presto Geary opened the front door and entered the house. He held a Winchester 30-06 rifle at his hip, its wide bore pointed at Beam. He was a large man, and he stooped a bit because of his height as he came through the door. The two remaining Dobermans squirmed and whined behind him.

  “Let it go,” Presto said, motioning with the rifle to the pistol Beam held. “Let it go and me and you can walk out of here and nobody else has to get hurt.”

  Beam wedged himself as far back against a wall as he could, the Walther warm and steaming in his hand. Only half of Presto’s face was visible to him; his lips were glazed and flattened beneath his nose, and his eye winked and sputtered continuously in a nervous tick like the gutter and bob of a match.

  “I don’t know you,” said Beam.

  “That’s okay,” answered Presto. “I’ll click on a light so you can see me better and we can get acquainted.” He hit a switch beside the door, revealing himself. He was wearing a slim black Stetson with the brimwings pinned up at either side so that the hat seemed like a crow roosted on his head. The rest of his dress was sleek and crisp; pressed button-down chambray shirt and stone-washed denim jeans, and the toes of his boots were polished bright as mirrors.

  “Now that you know how I look, you best come with me.” Presto smiled thinly and motioned toward the doorway.

  Ella rose up from the floor, her fingers damp with her father’s blood. “He’s not going with you,” she said.

  Presto pointed the rifle at her. “You’re a feisty one, I can tell. I may just have to fuck some of the bitch out of you.”

  Ella jerked her chin at him. “You don’t get off this place, I’ll kill you.”

  A small wet laugh squirted out of Presto. “I never killed a woman before,” he giggled.

  “You ain’t nothing,” Ella muttered. Her voice quavered a bit, but her eyes remained steady and fastened on Presto. “You ain’t nothing at all.”

  Presto laughed again. “Baby doll,” he said, “I am something. I’m the something you been having nightmares about since you was pissing in your Underroos. Now you best back away from me unless you want a hole in your chest.”

  Ella slowly backed away from Presto.

  “Atta girl,” he said. Presto stepped further into the house, turning the rifle on Beam. “Lay that pistol down,” he commanded.

  Beam crouched down and laid the gun on the carpet.

  “That’s good. Now step towards me. And do it slow.”

  Beam took a single step. Suddenly, Ella leapt forward, grabbed the barrel of the rifle and jerked it upward. The weapon discharged with a great thunder, blowing a hole in the ceiling and calling down a drizzle of plaster. Presto laughed again and tried to throw Ella off his shoulder, but she clasped to him tightly and bit down into his cheek and didn’t let go, not even when the Dobermans bounded into the room and sank their fangs into her legs and they all clattered to the floor in a massed tangle. The rifle discharged a second time, the bullet tearing through Presto’s shoulder as a spray of blood fanned against the wall. Beam, who’d stood shocked and frozen, picked the Walther pistol from the fl
oor and started running, past the dogs and Presto and Ella sprawled on the floor and out across the soft grass of the yard and beyond the maples and pawpaws and past the Cadillac, the breath aboil in his chest as he rushed over the knotty ground, and he did not look back as he ran without direction through the dark as if he meant to chase stars down from the sky, running until he slammed into a fence and fell back winded and startled on the warm earth, his belly cut from the barbwire. Behind him, the rifle fired again, and he pulled himself from the ground and jumped the fence and ran until he came to the edge of a black forest where the trees took him and he tripped and fell again, rolling down into a draw through a ticking of damp dead leaves and kindling.

  At the bottom of the draw, a creek scurried by. He waited, his breath heaving. Far off, he heard the dogs coming. Without a thought, he ran into the creek, splashing downstream through the shallows, the water damping his legs so that he moved slowly as if in a dream. When he climbed up a sandy bank, dragging himself out of the creek by the roots of trees, his fingernails were broken and bloody. He ran alongside the creek for a spell, past beaver flumes and muskrat tunnels until out of the darkness a large beech tree loomed. The branches were low. He went to climb them and when he did, he found he still carried the pistol. There in his hand like a miracle, its heft cold and dead. He stowed it in the waist of his jeans and went up, ascending the branches with the leaves clattering like rolled bones until he found the fork. There, he pushed himself against the crotch of branches and took the pistol out, holding it close over his heart, letting the blood simmer down inside him. He listened, but couldn’t hear the dogs any longer. Somewhere, he thought he heard rain blowing, but the world around him was dry and empty. Old fencing shivered. The snap of a broken twig. The wind having its way, fondling the earth. That was all there was, and he lay quiet as his breath began to ease, and he strained to listen to the night and to all that lived inside it.

  After Beam fled, the dogs released their grip on Ella. They paced onto the porch and stared into the night, but they didn’t follow Beam, their loyalties seemingly torn between pursuit and remaining nearby their wounded keeper.

  Presto rolled onto his back and pulled himself up into a sitting position. He held a hand over his shoulder as the blood dripped loose as silk between his splayed fingers. Somehow, he was still wearing his hat.

  Ella lay on her stomach, her legs bleeding. She rose up raggedly, pulling herself to the couch. On the floor, her father was dead, his eyes fixed open. And then there was the rifle—it rested on the floor between her and Presto. They both stared at it as the breath caught up to them in spacey gusts.

  “Well, now,” Presto groaned, propping himself up against the wall. “Just what are we gonna do about this, little girl?” He waved a hand at the dogs. “Fetch ’em up,” he hissed, and the dogs sprang off the porch and bounded into the darkness, howling until their noise faded away.

  He turned and looked at Ella on the couch. “You go easy,” he said. He winced and tightened the grip on his shoulder. “I could’ve whistled those dogs on you, but I didn’t. I sent them after our boy Beam and you ought to thank me for that.”

  Ella remained quiet. Through the open front door, the porch lay bare and clean in the moonlight, the shadow of tree branches falling over the boards.

  “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Presto grunted. “I’m gonna reach for that rifle and you’re gonna set right there and not think about nothing. You’re gonna do that because you’re a good girl that don’t want nothing worse to happen tonight. That’s the way it has to be, okay? You hearing me?”

  Ella looked at him. He was pale and sweating and the breath bluttered inside his chest.

  “Okay,” she answered.

  “I knew you were a good girl.”

  Presto pushed himself up into a slow standing. His eyes rolled in his head for a moment, and when his gaze steadied, a startled recognition passed over his face, as if he was seeing for the first time what he’d spent all his life looking for.

  “Girl?” he whispered.

  Ella grabbed the rifle, shucked a shell into the chamber and swung the muzzle around. When she pulled the trigger, there came a bald thrust of light and sound that threw Presto against the wall, his blood spattering the sheetrock, and then he slumped to the floor, his eyes staring dead and empty.

  The rifle clattered at Ella’s feet.

  She didn’t wait. She fished a ring of keys from Presto’s pocket, grabbed her purse off the floor, and ran through the open door and down the porch steps, limping on her dog-bitten legs. She got into the Cadillac, and when she turned the engine over, the rumbling was thick and strong. She turned the car in the yard and peeled out up the driveway. In a haze, she found a circuitry of back roads, her mind spasming with fear and blood loss, and in her rushing horror she took a curve too quick and the car fishtailed in the loose gravel. It left the road in a soundless leap, and it seemed, in that yawning stalled moment before the crash of lights and the boom and shear of metal, that the night had suddenly hushed as it opened up to hold her.

  XVI

  SATURDAY

  In the dry morning, Elvis arrived at Pete Daugherty’s place, accompanied by a deputy named Filback. Two Doberman hounds lay dead in the dust of the yard, their carcasses covered with a swarm of blowflies. Pete’s truck was parked in the shade of a stand of pawpaw trees, as was Ella’s LTD. The tires of both vehicles slouched flat and airless on their rims. The front door of the house swung idly on its hinges.

  “This don’t look good at all,” said Filback. He was young and portly, his hair still wet beneath his hat, razor burn on his throat. The father of three squall-prone children he often brought to departmental functions, he spoke with the kind of vexing tones only those settled in marriage use, quick and sure of everything already obvious.

  He went to open his door, but Elvis halted him. “Let’s wait a second,” he said. Elvis stared at the house as the morning light fell against the tin roof. “What you got to learn is not to rush into anything.” He took his hat off the console and fixed it on his head, taking care that the brim was straight, checking himself in the rearview mirror. “Always take time to put your hat on. That gives you a second to figure out what you need to do—in this case, call an ambulance for the ones that are laying there and arrest the ones that done it.”

  Filback snickered. “You want me to call an ambulance for those dogs?”

  “No. But likely there’s a least one somebody in that house who’s not in walking condition.” Elvis slid his gun out of its holster, checked the loads, and fixed the weapon back on his hip. “Take the shotgun and go around back,” he said. “After you’ve radioed for an ambulance.”

  Once the paramedics had been called, the two peace officers got out of the cruiser. Filback shucked shells into the breech of his Benelli, but Elvis kept his pistol holstered as he moved slowly through the yard under the hanging pawpaw and maple branches. When he came up onto the porch, he paused, listening as Filback moved around back through the joe-pye and jimson weeds.

  The front door drifted closed, and then open. There was no clean way to do this. That much he’d learned. Whatever lay inside a house, it was just going to have to be dealt with. There was no way to stop any of it now. This was going to happen. Just as it always had. No matter how long you took to put your hat on, eventually you had to go through a door and meet whatever waited on the other side for you.

  Elvis squinted through the cracked door at the innards of the house. Sunlight glared off the blank television screen. A pile of beer cans were scattered about the carpet. A front window had been shattered.

  “Pete,” he called. Then again, louder, “Pete, this is Elvis. You all right?” No one answered. A cold draft leeched from the house and licked his hands. Around back, Filback tromped through the high weeds, peering into windows and making nothing but noise and trouble.

  Elvis drew his revolver and went inside. Another Doberman lay dead on the carpet against the far wall, it
s tongue lolled out swollen and pale from between its jaws. Pete was slouched against a close wall, his eyes dead and open, his hands sprawled empty and bloody in his lap. He had the look of someone who’d recently been swindled. Beside him, Presto Geary lay swathed in blood, and Elvis noted a small entry wound in his chest and a fist-sized exit wound in his back.

  Slowly, Elvis made his way through the house, down the dim hall with its warped paneling, through the kitchen stinking of unwashed dishes and fried bologna and beans, to the back rooms, which held only a bed and ricks of junk—sewing machines and come-alongs and all the old man’s tinkerings.

  When he returned to the front room, Filback was standing in the doorway, the shotgun hanging loose at his side.

  “Put the safety on, Filback,” Elvis told him.

  The deputy jerked at the sound of Elvis’s voice. He looked at the gun he held and then clicked it dead.

  “Nobody home,” said Elvis. He holstered his pistol and sat down on the sofa, looking at the two dead men on the floor. Flies crawled through their hair and eyelashes and into the open maw of Pete’s throat, their buzzing loud and awful in the hot closeness of the house.

  “This party didn’t turn out too well, did it?” said Filback.

  Elvis looked up at Filback, who wore a limp grin. A single snaggly tooth hung over his bottom lip so he looked like a gawker come to the carnival to witness strange evil and give crude commentary.

  “Sit down, Filback. Mind you don’t step in the blood.”

  The deputy looked about the room and then made for the chair sitting beside the television. It creaked with his weight. He stowed the shotgun between his legs and the damp hair hanging from under his hat made him resemble a widow waiting in a bus terminal, as if he were a bereft woman bound somewhere. “I wouldn’t have thought Pete to go out this way,” he said.

  Elvis leaned forward and scanned the bloody carpet covered with shell casings, the pile of beer cans beside Filback’s feet, and the rifle on the floor. He reached down and picked up one of the empty brass shells, pinching it between his fingers. “Believe this is a pistol round here,” he said. He jiggled the casing in his hand and nodded toward Presto’s body. “But he wasn’t shot with any pistol round. That rifle did the job.” He pointed to the long-barrel Winchester 30-06 on the floor, then nodded toward the Doberman. “That’s one of Loat’s dogs,” he said. “And that’s Presto Geary lying there, though his ride ain’t nowhere around.”