The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  “No?”

  Loat shook his head. “Soil has leeched out. So you can’t sow clover or fescue on it. Plus, it ain’t even sturdy enough to put houses on.” He waved a hand at the window. “It’s spent ground.”

  “I bet I could make a living off it,” the trucker said. “Now see, what you got to do with a spot like this, one that’s had every kind of wrong and sin done against it, you got to purify it. Way you do that is you go out and appease all the ghosts that’s wandering round out here. You tell them, ‘Go on, shade! Go on out to eternity! Your work here is over and through!’ You need to tell them because they ain’t been told before. Once you do that, this’ll be as fine a place to lay a farm down as you could want.”

  Loat looked down at the gun in his lap. He wondered when he would have to kill the trucker. The man was mouthy, and Loat knew a time would come when he’d have to stop his tongue and then bury him behind Daryl’s, the way the trucker had buried Clem. Something about the man said that he would have to be dealt with. Maybe it was because he was a stranger who had stowed himself away in the affairs of a place he knew nothing about, as if he thought he could find passage among the vexed and angry men he’d happened upon, as if their afflicted vengeance could bear him somewhere else. But who would want to go wherever such as these were bound?

  “Anybody ever told you that you’re a peculiar bastard?” Loat asked.

  The trucker smiled. “Now see, that’s an old fortune you’re telling. Being peculiar is just being born at the wrong time.” He took a curve too fast and the tires groaned before he straightened their course.

  Loat scratched the barrel of the pistol with his thumbnail. The bluing greased his finger. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Here?”

  “Yeah. Why in the hell are you riding around with me looking for Beam? That don’t square at all.”

  “What else should I be doing?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Hauling your suits. Getting drunk. Getting laid. Anything but driving around in a place you ain’t from looking for somebody you don’t know.”

  The trucker pressed his hands into the steering wheel. The ring of keys dangling from the ignition jiggled and chimed. “Now see, it’s just like I said about those specters. Some folks ain’t been told the news. Well, I’m here to tell them and I also am here to collect on all outstanding debts, with interest,” he said. “I am here for a due balance. That one Beam insulted me when he called me a thief. I don’t steal anything. I just collect on what I’m owed.”

  “That don’t make one fucking iota of sense,” Loat grunted. “The reason you’re sticking your neck out is because some punk kid insulted you?”

  “Now see, here’s a story,” the trucker began. “A friend I know used to haul frozen chickens in a refrigerated rig. He stopped in at a Louisville gas station one night off of I-65. All he wanted was coffee and an hour to rest and to smoke. So he sat down in a booth with his cigarettes and his JFG. He’s there about fifteen minutes when this fellow with a camp hatchet walks in and my friend is the first poor bastard this man sees. He walks over and swings that hatchet, but my friend is quick, you see, and he raises his arm and the blade gets buried to the bone. Blood everywhere on the white table and tile floor. But my friend is quick again. He pulls the hatchet out of his arm and plants it between this other fellow’s eyes. Splits him right down to the nose. Opens his head like an oyster.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Loat.

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it. Why’d that feller hit your friend with the hatchet in the first place?”

  The trucker shook his head. “Now see, there just wasn’t any reason for it, was there? My friend had never seen this man before in his life. He just came in with his eyes white as boiled eggs and hit him with the hatchet. That’s all there is to it.”

  Loat thumbed the grooved edge of the pistol’s barrel. “I’ve heard stories like this before. None of them point to anything.”

  “Here’s the point to this one. We could try and give a reason why that man came into the gas station with a hatchet. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe his wife had just left him. Or maybe he was on a cocaine blitz. We could say he never was quite right and had a history of antisocial behavior. The newspapers told it like that. Now see, we could say the same. We could say that because it would seem to make things fit to a pattern. But we’d be neglecting the proper truth.”

  “And what kind of truth is that?” Loat asked.

  “The only kind of truth there ever has been. I’m talking about the fact that the heart is a mystery.”

  “I don’t think there’s too much mystery in a crazy fellow hitting your friend with a hatchet.”

  “Now see, the reason you say that is because you think the story don’t matter because you know it and have heard a thousand more just like it.” The trucker shook his head in a sad, almost defeated way. “But knowing something doesn’t mean it isn’t a mystery. Take fish, for instance.”

  “Fish?”

  “Yes. Catfish, say. It’s easy to believe you know catfish. Where they spawn and how deep to fish for them at certain times of year. But even the best angler can go out and put stink bait on his hook and throw out in a hole he knows is full of cats, a hole where he’s caught them many times before even, and still come home hungry. Why is that? The man still knows catfish. But what he can’t never know is their coming and going, to and fro, up and down in the waters. If a man was to know that, to know everything he could about a catfish, why, I just think it would break his heart and take the life right out of him.” The trucker’s head bobbed in silent affirmation. “A man needs to believe there’s some kind of miracle at work in the world.”

  Loat looked out the window at the passing land brushed with morning. The trucker’s voice had a brash country snarl inside it, even when he spoke calmly, as if he were perpetually on the verge of murder, and the blonde hair smeared over his skull made him appear whipped and ridden by some devil from the back-of-beyond of hell.

  “Doughballs,” Loat mumbled to himself.

  “What?”

  “Doughballs. Maybe that fisherman you was talking about should’ve used doughballs instead of stink bait. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone home hungry then.”

  The trucker slapped the steering wheel. “That’s all right, Loat,” he laughed. “Now see, you’re all right. You know when somebody is full of bullshit.” The trucker shook his head. “Doughballs,” he repeated with a chuckle.

  They drove on. Passing through a stand of oaks, the light cowered, but then they came beyond the clutch of hardwoods and the stripped land sprawled lewd before them again, the sun a hazy red welt behind a smoothing of clouds that coated the sky like salve. The road turned to gravel, the pebbles knocking against the tire wells.

  On the down slope of a hill were two large streaks in the gravel where a car had braked violently, and at the bottom of the hill a clutter of trash had been spilled in the middle of the way. The trucker slowed as the trash became apparent: the scatterings of a purse, compacts and lipstick vials, a mauve wallet, loose change, tissues.

  “It looks like some lady lost her goods,” said the trucker.

  A pair of tire marks curved off to the right of the road, leading to divots in the gravel shoulder. Blue paint was crusted onto some of the riprap piled there and on the elm saplings spoking up from the cheat grass, which lay matted and beaten.

  “It looks like there’s where she left the road,” Loat said. “We better inspect this.” He woke Enoch and the dog and the two men descended from the truck. Loat picked up the wallet, undid the clasp and studied the contents. A few dollars. Credit cards. Driver’s license. “Ella Daugherty,” he said. He passed the wallet to the trucker, who examined the laminated photo. A woman that required some looking.

  “You know her?”

  “Sure,” said Loat. “Pete Daugherty’s daughter.” He moved toward the edge of the roadway to where the tire marks fled through the cheat grass. Enoch trott
ed beside him. For a moment, Loat stood looking into the ravine, making note of the way the saplings bent, a few smeared with blue paint. Finally, he made his slow descent.

  The Cadillac rested upside down at the bottom, its wheels in the air, the black of its undercarriage showing dull and greased, a crack in the chassis apparent and jaggedly vivid. Loat came down the slope slowly, watching his steps. The dog skulked behind him. Wind rattled the husks of milkweed around them.

  When Loat reached the car, he crouched and through the rear windshield discovered Ella sprawled over the backseat, a crease of blood glaring from her forehead. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell.

  “This looks a treasure,” said the trucker.

  Loat jerked at his voice. He hadn’t heard him come down the slope, but now the man squatted beside him, the tails of his blazer leaping in the breeze.

  “Help me get her out,” Loat said.

  They wrenched the driver door open and ladled Ella onto the ground. She seemed to pour into their arms and then drip through their fingers, a liquid weight. The blood on her was dry. As they lifted her up out of the ravine, her light hair straying and catching on sawbriars, she made a few groans of pain and her eyes darted open and then closed again like polyps. The Doberman panted and circled about, so maddened by the scent of blood that Loat had to kick him away.

  Returning to the rig, they stowed her in the bunk, resting her on some crusty blankets. For a spell, they watched her, their quiet equal to hers, as if she were a glowing fire they would sleep beside. Finally, they resettled themselves. The trucker cranked the engine over, and they drove away.

  “Go on back to Daryl’s,” Loat instructed.

  “You don’t want to go on to Pete’s?”

  “No. I think I can figure what happened.” Loat looked out the window at the woods rushing by. “Beam’s still out there somewhere.”

  At the next crossroads, the trucker did a turnabout in the middle of road, and they roared back the way they had come.

  The rode in silence for awhile. After a few miles, the trucker spoke. “What do you think happened out there at Pete’s?” he asked. “And what about your man Presto?”

  Loat shucked the clip from his pistol, drew the slide back to free the round that was in the chamber, then polished the barrel with the sleeve of his shirt. “Fuck Presto,” he said. “Man can’t take care of my Cadillac, he can’t expect me to waste no worry over him.”

  XVIII

  SATURDAY

  The leaves rattled a whispery snicker as Beam crawled down from the branches and stood on the soft moss like a creature numinous and newly descended to earth. He’d slept sometime during the night, a kind of rigid aimless doze, and his ribs ached from sprawling in the beech limbs.

  For a moment, he thought of climbing back into the beech, wondering if the balm of sudden sleep might again befall him. He looked up into the tree. The silver of its bark gleamed in the sun, and its leaves curled like strange feathers in the breeze. He placed his hand on the trunk, which was covered in carvings, vague dendroglyphs, moss-grown runes and dates, the work of blades long rusted to brittleness. He ran his fingers through their grooves. Here was testament to the old troubles—love and loss and the abatement of wealth, the toil come to naught. Rain had drawn canals in the limbs of the tree, water tracing the wood and working its way down the old courses to fade the record cut into the bark.

  The wind came up and swatted the last of sleep from his eyes. Beam checked the cartridges in his pistol. He slid the clip out and blew dirt from the housing and then reloaded the gun before stowing it back in the waist of his jeans. The cold barrel gave him a chill.

  Before him, the woods lay level and clean, with only scant undergrowth, greenbriars and hogweeds sprouting along the root-runs of trees, a few wind-falls rotting into the black soil. Everything seemed tended and swept, as if some unseen keeper, some impish tenant warden, had broomed away all the debris, all brush, all the wild clutter, and left behind a fine smooth green flowing out and leading, somehow, to peace.

  Beam bent to retie his boots and saw the blood crusted along the laces and tongues of his Laramies. Remembering the night and the guns and the dogs, he knew there would be no peace. Pete was dead, maybe Ella as well, and the hounds were still after him and he could run all he wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. Picking up a handful of dead leaves, he scraped the toes of his boots, but the stain had set in the leather and nothing could take it away.

  He sat on the ground, closed his eyes, and saw Ella and the dogs tangled together on top of Presto Geary, the blood slicking across the floor. The thought that he’d abandoned her gripped him and he felt a sink in his gut. He had left at the moment she needed him most. It didn’t matter that she had wanted him to give himself up. Her own fear had worked her down that path, and he could forgive her for it. He could forgive her everything. But he could not forgive himself, and it had always been so. Even the slightest infraction from the way back times of his childhood stood branded in hot lettering on his conscience, whether it was shirking his duties on the ferry or being too quick to use his fists over a poolroom squabble at The Doe Eyed Lady. He heard all his many sins being read aloud to him again.

  He raked his boots through the leaves and then got up and began walking. He did not know where he was going, he only knew he couldn’t be still. He moved under the low branches and out through the shade of the forest with its deep covering of moss while the full boughs rocked above him in the wind. He did not know where he was going, but he hoped there would be water there. His tongue clung to the roof of his mouth. He had no plan now other than to get water.

  After a time, he came to a low spot in the woods where a copper spring trickled out of a rock face, a dull spitting of penny-colored water that piddled over ferns and stones and then disappeared into a sink in the ground. He stood staring at the spring, knowing he couldn’t drink it, and his thirst grew large inside him. He went on.

  Eventually, he came to a car, a blue and elderly Buick Skylark strangled in sawbriers, rust leeching over the paint, the chrome of the wheels spangling white in the sun. A dead hickory snag had fallen across the trunk and crushed the back end, yet the windows and windshields stood intact. Beam looked around him, but there was not even a trace of road anywhere. This was a car where no car should be.

  He looked inside. The faded upholstery foamed yellow stuffing and sprouted rusty springs, and the backseat was diamonded with broken glass. The driveshaft lay in the floorboards. The radio swung pendulous on nervy wires. Birdshit spackled the dashboard, and moss covered the steering column and the door panels. Beam kicked the briers clear and yanked the driver side door open, the hinges squawking, and a smell like the air from a cellar swam over him, a dank aroma of rubber and rotten carpet and mouse droppings. Still, it was a place to sit down. He dragged himself inside and shut the door.

  He craned his neck and looked at himself in the rearview. Deep hoops of shadow hung beneath his eyes, and his skin had turned a sick and curdy yellow. His lips were cracked from thirst. On the floorboard was a puddle of rainwater, as a gash in the roof of the car had allowed storms and the passing weather to wander in. Beam struggled down and lapped at the puddle, slapping the lukewarm water over his face. It smelled awful. It tasted worse, a faint hint of carpet and a tinge of metal and paint, but the thirst was large in him and he drank until the puddle was diminished.

  He sat back upright in the seat. The heat of the car pulsed around him. He rested his hands on the wheel and watched the sunlight fall casual and scant through the upper canopy of trees into the walnut saplings and briers below. The gun itched his back. He took it out of his jeans and laid it on the seat beside him. Then he leaned his head back and tried to think of nothing.

  He might have slept. He didn’t know, and that uncertainty made him initially confuse the two Dobermans for a nightmare. They came trotting through the trees, muzzles lowered to the ground. He watched them through the windshield and thought this is noth
ing real, this is only dream stuff. But then the dogs growled and one leapt onto the hood of the Buick, and when its claws clanked on the metal, he knew he was not dreaming.

  In his startled fear, Beam grabbed the Walther pistol and pumped two shots through the windshield. The glass cracked but held. The dog jumped back, then came again, growling and snarling as it began to dig at the damaged glass. The other dog trotted in circles around the car, an anxious angry whine rising from its gut until it too sprang up onto the hood of the car. Both dogs pushed their heads through the gash in the metal roof so that their drool fell onto Beam’s face and arms in hot steamy blots. He shouted curses at the animals and kicked at the roof with his boots. The metal boomed, but the dogs continued to howl and bark as Beam squirmed lower in the seat.

  It was then that he became aware of the wasps. They had built a nest under the front seat, and they erupted in a black and yellow swarm around him. One stung him just below his left eye. He screamed as his eye immediately began to swell shut. Another pricked him on the cheek, another on his hand so that he dropped the gun and it discharged with a heavy cough, leaving a gaping hole in the floor. The wasps were now thick in the car, bumping against the roof and windows, stinging Beam repeatedly so that he fell to the floor. In a great spasm of rage, he managed to pull himself up and yank the nest from under the seat. His hand instantly became black with wasps and the pain that darted up his arm was unlike any he’d known before. Somehow, he rolled the passenger window down a few inches and flung the nest outside and then crawled into the rear seat, his vision blurred from the wasp venom, his head a woozy quiver. He lay down flat on his back. Far off, the dogs continued to wail, but the sound faded as Beam closed his eyes and the dark swallowed him up.

  Night had fallen when he awoke. Crickets puzzled over their old concerns in the dark, and moonlight fell in a scattered pattern through the trees. The wasps were gone, but the places on his body where they’d stung him throbbed and ached. The swelling of his left eye had receded, but his vision remained blurry.