The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  “Check the initials on these,” he said.

  Daryl pushed himself forward and peered through the lens. Etched into each die, in a tiny near illegible script, were the letters LD.

  “What Clem told me before I took him out back,” said the trucker, “is that Loat gave him those dice. That they were the same ones he tossed with you out at the mines. That Loat made sure it turned out the way it did.”

  “A man who is about to die will say anything,” Daryl said. “Plus, you could have plucked those dice off anyone and then scratched those letters on there. I got no reason at all to trust you.”

  The trucker placed the magnifying glass in his pocket and straightened the lapels of his blazer. “Do you believe that in your heart?” he asked.

  “My heart? You talking pretty now, ain’t you? I don’t ask a thing of my heart. Only children and women are fool enough to go with their heart.”

  “I won’t try and convince you, then,” said the trucker.

  “And why’s that?”

  “It’s beneath me.”

  “Beneath you?”

  “I won’t waste time stringing a fence around the truth so you can see how it’s shaped.”

  Daryl eyed the trucker. He sat sleek and firm, his hair raked over his scalp, his breaths small and easy as if he were sipping idly at the air. “It don’t make sense,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Loat putting his initials on those. That’s a dumb thing to do.”

  “Now see, there’s some men made that way,” the trucker said. “They got to put their mark on everything they touch. They got to let the world know what belongs to it and what belongs to them. Now see, Loat’s marked you just like he marked these dice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The trucker picked up the dice and spilled them forth over the desk again. “Cast these bones out and so he made of you a man only mostly there,” he said. He picked up a single die and held it pinched between his fingers. “You got his mark just like these dice. Now see, it’s not enough for Loat to have things and have them do what he wants. He’s got to put his sign on it. Got to play that old whore whose name is legend and whose strength is legion.”

  “I don’t have one clue what you’re talking about,” said Daryl, shaking his head.

  The trucker placed his hands down flat on the desk. “Now see, you build a legend around a man with what he owns and what he’s done and he’ll look as big as God himself from the outside. And Loat ain’t no fool. He knows the game well enough to fix it.”

  “You saying he owns me?”

  “Don’t he?”

  Daryl fell silent. He thought of all the years playing tote-along to Loat, running his drugs and giving him a cut from what he made on the whores, Loat snickering in his dreams so it seemed that Daryl often woke to the sound of the man’s laughter. And then his mind pushed even further, to the night at the mines when he’d crouched in the blue moonlight to throw dice with Clem, Loat standing beside them like a sleek totem, his eyes burning down at the circle of dust where the dice lay scattered. “That’s it,” said Loat. “Clem rolls nine. You got to climb it, Daryl.” After that, the rush of light and heat, the fire and the fall, the black pull of the air, the smell of electricity, of singed hair and the soft padding of grass that caught him.

  “I don’t see why he’d want to save Clem like that,” Daryl said, almost whispering now. “Why he’d have him throw those loaded dice so it’d be me to maybe get killed and not Clem.”

  The trucker slid the dice off the desk into his palm and pocketed them. “The why of it don’t matter so much as you knowing it’s the truth,” he said.

  Daryl blinked as if noticing the man seated before him for the first time. “Why are you telling me any of this?” he said. “And why did you go to the sheriff and tell him about Beam?”

  The trucker shifted in his chair. “I want a price,” he said. “You can understand that, I’m sure. Being a businessman, you have to shop around.”

  “Did you think there’d be some kind of reward out?”

  “I didn’t think that.”

  “Then why go to Elvis?”

  “I didn’t say the price had to be money.”

  Daryl raised a pink stump to his chin and scratched his whiskers. “If it ain’t in money, then how would it get paid?”

  The trucker looked around the room, as if perusing it for appraisal, eyeing the scattered wealth of televisions, liquor, the promise of women that might be worth his services. “I’ll not refuse a dollar,” he said. “But I might like to have it paid in other ways.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Prices and payments. What the fuck is it you’re selling, anyway?”

  The trucker cocked his head back and drew a long breath that made it sound as if the air about him were sizzling. “Now see,” he said, “I got this trade. It’s the thing I was born to, so I got to go out and work it. Man don’t work at the trade he’s born to, he’s lower than dirt in my opinion. When I stopped in your bar the other day and seen the doings that went on here I knew I’d come to the right place to work.” He leaned forward and placed his hands on the desktop again. “You give me a fair price and I’ll bring Loat to you.”

  “That your trade? Murder for hire?”

  “That’s part of it. I’m a damn fine hand at piano, too. Play that boogie-woogie. That doo-wop. That rock ‘n roll. Got some Mozart and Beethoven up my sleeve, too. Classical shit, you know.”

  “I ain’t in the market for a piano player,” Daryl said. “And if I wanted Loat gone, I could’ve done it myself years ago.”

  “Now see, I just don’t think that’s the truth. He’s the big fish in this pond. But I can tell you ain’t no small fry yourself. Pond’s too small for two big fish. One got to go belly up. But you ain’t had the sauce to catch that big fish all these years so I think you need a man got the bait.”

  Daryl stroked the desktop with one of his stumps. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You just happen by my bar after giving Beam Sheetmire a ride up here. Okay, maybe that just happened. But now you’re telling me you’ll kill Loat for a price? And all this after going to the sheriff?” Daryl shook his head. “That don’t hold water.”

  “Going to the sheriff was just me shopping around,” said the trucker. “I had to gauge all the angles and make the best play. Now see, it’s like a piece of music. You can play it just like the sheet says and that’s what most do. But they’s a kind like me that wants to push the song and make it really talk. Make their own arrangement. Going to the sheriff was just me playing a scale and seeing how the notes all fit together.”

  Daryl sat silent for a spell, his eyes leveled on the trucker as if he could see something ancient and undiluted in him, like the misty banks of the first morning’s broken shore where the waters lapped at the warming mud, and it might have been the print of God’s own finger there.

  “All I want,” the trucker said, breaking the silence, “is to bring you Loat. You leave Beam to me to deal with as I see fit.”

  “What do you want with Beam?”

  “He called me a thief.”

  “And that’s enough to make you want him dead?”

  “I can’t abide it.”

  “And you can’t get Beam unless Loat is out of the way. You saw that clear off, didn’t you?”

  “I see lots of things.”

  “How much would it cost to do this?” Daryl asked.

  “Forty,” said the trucker.

  “Forty?” Daryl coughed. “That’s steep trade.”

  “Now see, I don’t mean forty large,” he said. “I just mean forty.”

  “Just forty?”

  “That’s right. All I need is a little walking around money. Enough to buy a sandwich and put some diesel in my rig. You can even consider me doing that Clem feller a cash back advance on services soon to be rendered.”

  “This all sounds like a pile of hot horse turds,” Daryl sai
d.

  “You may think so,” the trucker said, “but I don’t like to be called a thief. I don’t like to be called nothing I ain’t. Don’t mind a bit if a man calls me all kinds of dreadful things, so long as they’re accurate. Why, a man might say, ‘He’s low down scum. He’s killed men and he’s whored and gambled and he fucked my grandmother. He’s an egg-sucking dog and I hope he dies.’ Now see, none of that don’t bother me because ever bit of it’s true.”

  “Whose grandmother did you fuck?” Daryl asked.

  “Can’t remember.” The trucker lifted a hand and slung the greasy net of his hair over his head. “I used to try and fuck ‘em all every chance I got. Now see, I can’t keep track of the ones I fucked and the ones I was aiming to fuck but never got around to. It’s a bad and worrisome state to be in.”

  Daryl stared at the man seated in front of his desk, his eyes a cruel and frozen blue. He’d never seen such a creature in his life. Suddenly, his chest began to quiver as a jolt of cold ran the length of his spine. It felt as if someone were stabbing the soles of his feet with chilled ice picks. He’d only felt this way once before, and that was the night out at the mines when Loat commanded him to climb the power pole with the pair of bolt cutters.

  “I can do for Loat same as I did for Clem,” said the trucker.

  Daryl tapped his feet against the floor. The sharp pains continued to run up his calves, and the ends of his stumps began to itch so that he scratched them against the edge of the desk. What the trucker said was true. Loat had always treated him like a lapdog, tossing him a few scraps here and there, but never letting him gnaw his own steak. And then there were the dice. He heard them clattering down over and over in his mind, and their echo gave him all the reason he needed.

  “There’s a roll of dollars in the top drawer of this desk,” he said.

  The trucker rose from his chair and came around the desk. He opened the top drawer and took out the roll of money and peeled off two twenties and then re-banded the roll and replaced it in the desk and shut the drawer. He folded the money into the breast pocket of his blazer and looked down at Daryl. “That Loat got a grandmother?” he asked.

  Daryl shook his head. “She’s been dead a long time.”

  “Well, I still might fuck her anyway,” he said. Then he winked at Daryl and left the room.

  XXI

  SUNDAY

  She was eating her lunch aboard the ferry when the cruiser slipped under the locust trees and parked on the landing. As the sheriff walked up, she continued to stir her fork through the bowl of tuna salad and she kept her head down and did not look up when his black shoes boomed on the metal hull.

  “Afternoon, Derna,” he said.

  She chewed and swallowed. “Elvis,” she answered.

  “Clem not working today?”

  Derna laid the fork in the bowl and placed it beneath the lawn chair she was sitting in. “Clem’s gone,” she said.

  “Oh? Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head once. “He left out Friday afternoon. Said he was going for groceries but he never come back.”

  Elvis rested his hands on his hips. “He took the truck?”

  “He took Old Dog.” She nodded. “I don’t look for him to be back.”

  Elvis moved closer to her and squatted beside the lawn chair, catching the sour scent of her body mixed with the warm muggy stench of the river.

  “Why don’t you think he’ll be back?”

  Derna narrowed her eyes at him. “I think some folks have seen to it that he can’t never come back,” she said.

  Elvis stood up. “What time did he leave Friday?”

  Derna shrugged and looked out at the river where the shoals flexed against the hull of the ferry. “Two or three, I guess. But it don’t matter. You won’t never find him. Be wasting your time if you was to even start looking. Same goes for that boy Beam of mine.” She threw a hand out, wiping it through the damp air. “Both of them gone.”

  “You didn’t tell me Beam had left.”

  “Clem sent him off,” she said.

  “Why did he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Elvis rolled his tongue inside his mouth nervously and then gripped the boat rails, his hands braced and spread before him as if to stall the waters, or at least slow them to the sidereal coming and going of the world itself as it clocked imperceptible through the void and its glassy black hourlessness. “You said some folks had seen to it that Clem wouldn’t come home. Who did you mean?” he asked.

  “You know who I mean. Don’t make me say it.”

  “Do you think saying a name to me is going to bring you more trouble than you’ve already had?”

  “You don’t know him like I do. He can read sign. He can track what’s gone and know what’s to come.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me he can fly, too.”

  Derna hardened her eyes and glared at Elvis. “I’d not mock what you don’t understand,” she said. “He was born in the dark of the moon with a caul over his head. You can’t know what that means other than he isn’t the kind of man that can be touched by the law. Not your law, anyway. Maybe not even God’s law.” She pulled at the edge of her collar and a smile crawled up one side of her face. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said.

  Elvis looked at her. With her eyes as fixed and solid as knobs of cold white bone, Derna did look a bit crazy, though he’d never tell her such a thing. He thought back through the years to when he’d first become sheriff and had learned of Derna, and the rumors of her whoring days, and he realized he’d never been anything but worried for this woman, who seemed to stare in constant aghast surprise at the world, as if she could not believe how far it had come away from what she had hoped it would be. “I think,” he said, “you’re a woman who’s had more than her share of hardship and that it’s no wonder the things it’s causing you to say. But what I really care about knowing is why all of this is happening. There’s two men missing and one drowned in the river. You need to tell me what you know, Derna.”

  She fretted with the collar of her blouse some more and then sighed. “Most men,” she began, “they love something, they see that it gets satisfied. They want to keep it and tend it so that it grows and gets healthy. Loat’s not that way. He takes love and swallows it down until there’s not a bit of it left in the world. You understand that and maybe you can know what it is you are up against.”

  “You and him were in love?”

  Derna nodded. “A bad kind of it.” She stood creakily and moved beside Elvis at the boat rails. Her fingers tapped the steel, her eyes studying the river as if it were a book, a worn keep of verses that even now were being writ with the ceaseless churn of the waters. “I left off whoring because I loved him. So I could only be with him. Then I found I had to leave him because what stood between us was the kind of love that would be a ruin to the both of us.” She turned and looked at the sheriff. “That’s when I took up with Clem. Clem could give me peace, but not love, so Loat didn’t mind me being with him. At first, I thought that meant Loat loved me so much he only wanted me happy. But I know that’s not how it is now. He wanted Clem to have me because he could keep me close that way. He could say anything and Clem would do it.” She blew a long breath out and raked her hand along the rail. “And it’s that Daryl that has been laying for Clem for now on twenty years. Ever since what happened out at the mines.”

  “I was out at Daryl’s just yesterday,” said Elvis. “There wasn’t a sign of Clem or his truck.”

  “And there won’t never be. Clem is somewhere at the bottom of a strip-pit and that’s where his truck is as well, I imagine.”

  Elvis straightened himself. “You think Daryl caught him out somewhere?”

  “No. I think he went to Daryl’s looking for Beam. I think he had to go out there. It kept eating at him, the way he’d been all his life, in the keep of Loat. I think he finally got
tired of it and he had to go out there. He never was a hard man, but the world kept asking him to be. I suppose I did some of the asking myself.”

  “I’ll get a warrant and search Daryl’s bar.”

  Derna slammed an open hand against the boat rail and a long tone shivered down the metal. “You’re not listening,” she said. “There’s nothing left of Clem. He’s gone. You can peek under every rug and curtain out at Daryl’s and that’s not going to change. I am telling you this because you came to me. And you looked like you wanted to know. Well, I’m saying it. You can’t best these men. So don’t try.”

  Elvis raked a shoe over the hull of the ferry. “Clem sent Beam off and then went looking for him? That what you’re telling me?”

  Derna crossed her arms and stared at him. “I guess you think that don’t make sense.”

  “No, I can’t say that it does.”

  Darts of shadow bled across the brown shoalwater beside the ferry and then coalesced into a single blot as a school of shad fled from a largemouth bass. Derna watched the chop and sling of the river while it broke on the white riprap along the bank. “Get old,” she said. “Get old and then you’ll see it. The way it is for most folks, they spend a good bit of their life trying to get back what they give away. They believe giving it away will save them because to have it makes them afraid. But then it’s gone and they’re the ones that made it leave and that eats at them until they go out to get it back again. Clem wasn’t any different.” She dropped her hands over the rails and watched the shad tremble and shift beneath the surface of the river. “I ain’t any different,” she said.

  “Does this have anything to do with Paul getting killed?”

  Derna twisted her eyes away from him. “It’s no harder thing in the world for a mother to say, I don’t reckon. And I just don’t believe I’ve got it in me to say it.”