The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  Filback tweezed his nostrils with a pair of pinched fingers. “Maybe he walked here,” he said.

  Elvis squinted at him. “Listen, Filback,” he said, “I didn’t bring any play-pretties for you to toy with. I don’t have any rubber bands or balls of yarn, but maybe you can sit there quiet and not shoot yourself or me and be all right. You think you can do that?”

  Filback let his tongue worm through his cheek. He leaned back in the chair, stowing the shotgun against his thigh. “Hell,” he said. “You asked me to come out here.”

  “I sure did,” Elvis answered. “And I’m already feeling guilty about that.”

  The deputy twisted on the hams of his thighs, the chair squirming beneath him. “You’re something, know that Elvis?”

  “Just remember who signs your paychecks,” Elvis said bruskly.

  “Election coming up in the fall,” Filback replied, smiling. “Might be different handwriting on my checks come January.”

  Elvis glared at Fillback, then got up from the sofa. He swatted at the pleat in his khakis, stepped carefully around the congealed pools of blood on the floor, and walked to the front door. With one arm braced against the frame, he looked outside on the bright dusty yard and the two dead hounds and the wide fields of billow hay scooting away like whitecaps toward the shade of the treeline.

  “I’m going out here to look through the yard, Filback,” he said. “Can you sit in here and not get spooked?”

  “Hell, I ain’t afraid. I’ve seen worse than this.”

  Elvis shook his head. He stepped out onto the porch and then down the steps, striding through the pale dirt toward the dogs, whose dead bodies had begun to swell. Flies and yellow jackets lit and drooped over the blood spilled thickly on the ground. One dog had been shot through the throat, its neck blown out in a tear of red meat, while the other had taken it in the chest. Elvis crouched beside their corpses. In the dust, he counted little runs of bird tracks, and a set of boot prints moving off toward the porch. He picked up something that glistened from a clump of cheat grass and held it before his eye, the light prisming down over his hand. It was shard of glass from a headlight. When he checked the headlamps on the LTD and Pete’s truck, he noted that all four were intact. Another puzzle.

  Chewing his bottom lip, he moved back toward the dogs. From here, two sets of dog prints seemed to head south toward the pasture. He followed the tracks slowly, through the yard to where the grass began to thicken and then down the lip of the lawn to where the fencing was strung. He put his hands on the top strand of barbs. The wire trembled under his fingers. By the look of the grass something had run through the field.

  A bunting bird lit on the wire some yards down, its indigo plumage like a daub dropped by a joy-mad painter. It sang a note and then shot off, falling and then rising on a gust. The wire shook beneath Elvis’s fingers.

  He had been reared by his grandmother in a large farmhouse that had sat at the back of a creek bottom hemmed by chestnut oaks. At night, the cool autumn dark settled down brittle and thin like a piece of cold beaten tin, and he would sit with her, she in a rocker, he on the stoop playing with a toy wagon he’d made, rolling its spool wheels over the boards.

  “Elvis, your head ain’t right,” she would croak. “They yanked you out with forceps and now you got that crease in your scalp, but it’s nothing to worry with.” The sledrunners of her rocker snicked on the porch. “Though I suspect some will worry anyway.” She leaned and spat a crimson streak of tobacco juice into a Folgers can. “Let them go ahead and worry. Me and you are okay and just fine out here. Know why?”

  “No,” said Elvis.

  “Because,” she leaned up in her rocker, “we know what birds mean.” Far off, a screech owl screamed in the oak trees. “Hear that? An owl in this moon means good fortune. Mark it. You can tell a lot of things by birds. Take the coloring of a thrush. He’ll be russet if the winter is going to be mild. A deeper red if it’ll turn heavy snow.” She leaned and spat again. Her phlegm fell into the coffee tin like an offered coin, a thing tithed out, and she wiped her lips with the heel of her palm. “Now, that means we’re all right. So long as we know what birds mean, can’t nothing wrong happen because we can know the wrong that’s coming. Or the good. And it is mostly good, Elvis. Remember that.”

  Touching the fence, he thought maybe he’d forgotten how to remember the good. Certainly, he’d forgotten what a bunting meant, if it divined ill or fortune, and he saw no pattern in the parted grasses of the hayfield.

  But he did remember his grandmother telling him that his head wasn’t right. Others had said the same thing, and maybe that was so. All the years unmarried, they came back to him as he watched the grass toss and bow. Not just unmarried, but no women to speak of. His house smelled of the rankness of ascetic bachelorhood, of mildew and underwear and shave cream and there were never flowers because he didn’t want a woman, because he didn’t know how to want a woman. The times he attended revivals or church socials, he made a point to stand away from them, bundled like cloth in their dressy bunches, their glossy lips smacking out quick chirpy sounds. Women were things to be ciphered out, figured on. Men were simpler. They did and were done in, whereas women lingered, pummeled into grist by the slow grinding of years until they were like powder cast before the wind.

  He thought of Ella Daugherty. Another woman out in the world and left to its mercy.

  He turned and walked away from the hayfield, back into the yard where the dogs lay. The wind raised the pawpaw limbs and the shadows drizzled and swam over the house.

  “Come out here, Filback,” he called.

  A clutzy rattle of beer cans came from inside the house and then the deputy stood in the doorway, the shotgun cradled in his arms.

  “I’m going to look for Ella,” Elvis said.

  The color washed out of Filback’s cheeks. “You are? What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Stay here and wait for the ambulance,” Elvis said. “You know how to fill out paperwork. And don’t get scared, Filback. There ain’t no such thing as ghosts.” Elvis opened the door to the cruiser and sat down behind the wheel, the car’s shocks rocking under him. He took his hat off and placed it neatly on the passenger seat. Then he cranked the key and the engine groaned over. He turned in the yard and dust rose about him and fled behind as he watched the house and yard disappear in his rearview until he hit the main of the highway and only had to look at what was coming at him instead of worrying about what lay behind.

  Ella’s single-wide sat vacant and lone, the driveway empty. The garden pinwheels in the crabby yard spun in the breeze, flashing kaleidoscopic blues and reds and greens brightly in the sunlight. Laundry hanging on the clothesline snapped and rolled.

  Elvis knocked heavily on the door, the storm screen creaking at his back, but no one answered. He called her name. Once, twice, three times. Again, nothing.

  He left for Daryl’s.

  The day flexed hot and ragged as Elvis got out of the cruiser. He remained in the parking lot for a time, studying the collection of junk trucks and failing vehicles, marking the patronage within by the various makes and models squatting in the gravel. At one end of the lot, a rigless trailer stood on its chickenleg mounts, white paint peeling from the aluminum.

  When he walked through the doors of the Quonset hut, the bar talk turned off. Beery eyes reached through the tangled fog to study him. Light spat off the tiered bottles behind the bar and the jukebox played soft and breathy, the squeak of a greasy fiddle sawing out of the speakers. Elvis strode forth through the abruptly broken quiet, his boots loud on the wooden floor, his own form seeming to recede away from himself as he ebbed deeper into this cauldroning dark.

  He put his hands on the bar. The wood beneath his fingers felt scored and rough. The tender, a pale and fat scowler, came over to inspect him.

  “Where’s Loat?” Elvis asked.

  The tender shook his head. “Not here.”

  “Let me talk to Daryl then.”
>
  The tender eyed him, his tongue pushed into his cheek. Then he turned and tromped off to the rear of the Quonset.

  Elvis waited. He kept his back to the dance floor, studying the drunks in the mirror hanging behind the bar, their bent and stalled bodies wrapped in the cigarette smoke like the web-trapped prey of spiders.

  When Daryl emerged from the back, he wore khaki trousers and a camo vest over his hairy belly. He moved like a buoy in the bar’s drafty currents.

  “Loat’s not here,” he said, propping the pink stump of an arm on the bar.

  “I know,” said Elvis.

  “What you want then?”

  “You know Beam Sheetmire?”

  “Clem’s boy? Yeah, I know who he is.”

  Elvis drummed his fingers against the bar. Behind him, the talk and dancing ignited again, the noise firing back to life, though it was now cautious and uneasy.

  “What’s he done?” Daryl asked.

  Elvis shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “That I know of.”

  Daryl wiped his chin against his shoulder, a strange and birdish motion. “If he ain’t done nothing and you ain’t looking for him, then why are you asking?”

  Elvis ignored the question. “Whose trailer is that parked outside?” he asked.

  “That’s mine,” Daryl answered. “Got a good deal on it. Plan on using it for storage.”

  “Storage, huh?”

  Daryl’s chalky dry lips broke into a smile. “Business is so good, I’m running out of room.”

  Elvis propped his elbows on the bar and folded his hands before him, stroking his chin with his thumbs. He tried to see an angle, some profit Daryl might be gleaning from the entire mess, but there seemed little sense to it. He wondered what help he was giving anyone by being in such a place as this.

  “You and Loat used to pal around with Clem,” he said.

  Daryl’s head bobbed. “We did at one time. Then Clem started to turn a little churchy. I don’t think he ever got real holy, but I know he quit drinking for awhile. Then he wound up with Derna and we never saw him hardly much at all after that.”

  “What happened with you and him and Loat out at those mines?”

  Daryl’s eyes went thin. “You know that story already,” he said coldly.

  “Way I heard it, there’s bad blood between you and Clem on account of it. So you tell me why that is.”

  Daryl squirmed on his stool. He leaned forward, his breath rattling in his nostrils. “There ain’t no bad blood,” he said. “Not no more.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You get old enough, time squares most of your debts.”

  “That don’t sound like you at all.”

  “I don’t believe you know me well enough to say what is and what ain’t like me. Clem wasn’t never going to make amends. He’s yellow as soap and twice as soft. So I decided I had bigger things to worry over.”

  Elvis put his hands on the bar again. “What’d he do out there at the mines?” he asked.

  Daryl snorted. “Oh, he just saw to it that it was me got the short end of the stick out there. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Elvis wiped absently at the bar top. “Is there bad blood between Loat and Clem?”

  Daryl leaned hard against the bar. “If you mean on account of Derna, I’d say there’s some. But I can guarantee you it ain’t something Loat worries over too much. He’s done had that pussy. And there ain’t a dollar to be made with it now no how, so you know he ain’t walking the floor over Derna. Whether or not it chaps Clem’s ass that Loat used to fuck his wife, I can’t say.”

  Elvis stroked the bar. The wood felt frayed and burned. “Loat ever talk about Paul?”

  “Not much. He’d say something every now and then, wondering what Paul was gonna do once he got out.” His head bobbed and he smiled wetly. “But, the river’s done took care of that.”

  “Somebody and the river.”

  Daryl’s smile faded. Then, quickly, the grin returned and he took to chuckling. “What’s all this about, Elvis? You come in here all swagger and swinging dick asking about Beam Sheetmire like he’s been lost in the high weeds.”

  Elvis watched the dancers in the mirror, their bodies dragging through the smoke. The laughter in the room thickened. “Had a feller come visit me at the courthouse the other day,” he said. “He was dressed like he’d been to a wedding. In a suit, I mean.” Elvis cocked his head, watching Daryl. “The feller told me Beam had been up here. Said he got beat pretty bad. Said he was the one to beat him.”

  Daryl licked the flesh beneath his nose. “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “Who was this feller?”

  Elvis shrugged. “Just a feller,” he said. “Anyhow, you ain’t seen Beam Sheetmire up here in your bar? That what you’re telling me? That it’s just been the regular crowd of drunks?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And I guess you ain’t seen nobody wearing a suit neither?”

  “I believe I’d remember that.”

  “I’d think you would too, but I suspect,” Elvis said, rising off his stool, “that you’ve told me nothing but lies today.”

  “Helluva thing to say to a businessman,” Daryl said.

  Elvis straightened his gun belt and hammered Daryl with his stare. “I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you I think you’re an outright sonuvabitch,” he said. “But that ain’t the worst part.” Elvis stepped back from the bar. “The worst part is trying to picture how a sonuvabitch like you wipes his ass and takes a piss. By the way you smell, I guess you don’t have much luck doing either.”

  Daryl laughed. “Come on back to the trough then, Elvis. You can shake my dick dry for me.”

  “I’ll get a warrant,” Elvis said. “This place will be closed in a day. I know these girls you got out here ain’t just waitresses and bar maids.”

  Daryl chuckled again. “Go on. See if you can get a judge to grant you that warrant. I’d love to hear the story about how Old Black Robes laughed you out of the courtroom and then took your badge. What happened to the last sheriff wanted to serve a warrant on me. You remember that, I know. Best recall how I got too much dirt on folks around here to ever get shut down.”

  Elvis patted the bar lightly, then turned and looked at the room. In the middle of the dance floor was a large black stain. He strode over and squatted beside it, the dancers giving him the strange eye as they shuffled around him. He bent down and touched the stain, the wood smooth and glossed. “You don’t keep your floors too clean out here do you, Daryl?” he yelled.

  “Hard to mop up everything that gets spilled,” Daryl answered. “There’s usually always some leavings left over.”

  Elvis stood up and slid his shoe over the stain. He looked over at Daryl on his perch before the bar, seated like some derelict king in a counting house whose currency was blood, a man who bartered only with death itself.

  He spat on the floor and left.

  XVII

  SATURDAY

  They heard the flash over the scanner bolted to the dash of the trucker’s rig. Two bodies had been found at Pete Daughtery’s house over on Belltown Road. The radio snored out the details: three dogs shot as well, all parties as yet unidentified. One deputy and Sheriff Dunne were on scene. Coroner and paramedics en route.

  Loat and the trucker were soon en route themselves.

  Coasting the back roads, Loat rode shotgun in the trucker’s Peterbilt, dotting the fields and woods with his stares. Two days ago, he’d left Presto at Pete Daughtery’s place with instructions to wait in the briars. Now he’d heard the news over the scanner. In his lap, he kept a Smith and Wesson .40-cal, stroking the grip-embossed handle and listening to the rig’s steel-belt tires yawn over the bald pavement.

  His plan remained cloudy. In fact, he had no plan at all and didn’t know how he hoped to explain to the sheriff his sudden arrival at Pete Daugherty’s place. He’d always gone where he pleased, but now he thought that perhaps larger forces had conscripted
him and his course long ago, perhaps before his birth. This idea struck him as stupendous and awful, and he quickly threw his mind away from it.

  His hound Enoch slept in the floorboards at his feet, its hide twitching as it dreamed through the squawk and bleat of the police scanner. It surprised Loat that the dog could sleep through such. The dreams of dogs must be sturdy. Were he a better man, he would build sturdy dreams for himself. Instead, he was riding over empty roads with this strange trucker and he was dying and there was neither time nor space with which to dream.

  “Pretty country,” said the trucker as they drove past fields devoid of timber. This land had been strip-mined and later reclaimed with dozers and track hoes that pushed the ruptured earth together again, but the soil had been cursed by its trespassers and was now only Judas dirt where sedge and wire grass spiraled up amidst sapling cedars sown to beat the wind back. It looked like a strange occurrence of prairie where no prairie should be. Certain spots still remained scarred with open strip-pits, and the surface coal flashed bluely in the sun, the ground itself ashy and coated with shale rock so that it appeared gray and shattered like the very geography of dereliction.

  “You think so?” Loat asked. He leaned forward and turned the scanner’s volume down.

  “Looks about like a dirty old wash pan that’s been beat to pieces and then glued back together,” the trucker answered.

  “Well, about all the good it’s doing is holding the world in place. Won’t nothing grow on it. I’d say it wouldn’t even be worth grazing cattle on.”