The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  Elvis took his hat off and stroked the brim. “I don’t believe you need to say anything,” he said. “There’s room enough in the not saying for me to figure what you mean.”

  A car braked on the far landing and honked its horn once. Derna slid her hands along the rails. “I thank you for the visit,” she said, “but I got to work now. I’m what all is left to do it.”

  Elvis placed his hat back on his head. “I’m going to help, Derna,” he said. “I don’t know if you believe that or not, but it’s what I’m going to do.”

  Derna smiled at him as she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ears. “You’d do well to wake up so you can see the ditch you’re headed for,” she said flatly. She moved off to start the tug. The motor gurgled up, a yellow froth churgling from the trolling prop.

  Elvis stepped off the deck onto the landing and watched as the ferry drifted into the river, the brown current furrowed and wimpling against its hull as the hawsers strained through their pulleys. He watched for awhile as the rudder cut its faint brief grooves in the river, and then he walked back to the cruiser and drove to the courthouse in town.

  XXII

  MONDAY

  In the afternoon, a quaky crowd of whores and miners gathered behind the Quonset hut. They sipped whisky from jelly jars, the men hugging closely to their women, many of whom were dressed in satin negligees. Loat stood among the crowd patting the head of the goat Samhill Doug. The day before, he had paid Daryl seventy-five dollars for the animal. He had then attached a dog collar and leash to the animal and led it out into the gravel lot behind the bar, where he left him overnight, without food or water. The fasting had sharpened the goat’s eyes to a hard and steely meanness and his hackles bristled with anger.

  The trucker, prim and slick in his suit, his hair gleaming under the day’s cloudy light, bounced over. He tickled Samhill under the chin, which drew a neigh.

  “I want you to show us just how good of a surgeon you are,” Loat said. “It’s what you claim, so I want to see some evidence.”

  “You want me to take this goat’s kidney out?” the trucker asked in response.

  “I’ll need it done myself,” Loat said, whispering to keep from being overheard by the onlookers. “But before I let somebody that dresses like you put me under the knife, I got see whether or not you can do it.”

  “I can sure enough do it,” the trucker said. “Cutting a goat is no different than cutting a man. It ain’t nothin’ but a simple division of the flesh.”

  “Well then,” Loat said, “let’s be for having it divided.” He walked over to a lounge chair someone had brought out and sat down and folded his hands behind his head. “Go to it,” he commanded.

  The trucker lifted himself on his boot toes and bobbed in the gravel. The crowd stirred jokey. The whores chirped and gushed, scooting their bare feet over the ground and stirring the dust in their ceaseless talking.

  “First thing we need to do,” began the trucker, “is to put a little sleep on this goat. Sing him a lullaby, you know.” He bent down and took a jar of bonded whisky and a vial of brown glass from the pocket of his trousers. He opened the vial and poured a faint yellow solution into the whisky, stirring the concoction with a finger long and pale as a skewer.

  “What’s that you’re putting in the Old Crow?” Loat asked.

  The trucker capped the vial and returned it to the bag. “Laudanum,” he said. He then straddled the goat. Samhill bucked, but the trucker put his knees into the animal’s ribs and lowered him to the ground. He pushed two fingers into the goat’s nostrils, lifted its snout, and poured the entire jar of whisky down his gullet. The goat swallowed and gagged and shook its head, flapping its ears as it stood and staggered.

  “We’ll wait a time,” the trucker said. “Give the whisky space. Let it abide in him.”

  The interval between sobriety and drunkenness was perhaps a quarter hour. The trucker paced the lot during this time, his lips pulled into a dreamy smirk until eventually the goat lay down and rested its head on its forepaws.

  “Is he ready?” Daryl asked. He had taken a seat beside Loat in a nylon lawn chair, his cheeks glossy with sweat.

  “He’s nearly there,” answered the trucker.

  “I hope to hell he is.” Daryl looked over toward a wall of clouds rising in the west. “Looks like rain to me.”

  The trucker turned and glanced at the coming weather. Then he knelt beside the goat, lifting and releasing its head, which slapped the ground loosely. “I believe he’s ready.”

  Rolling Samhill onto his belly, the trucker slung himself against the goat’s bulk. When he’d positioned the animal to his satisfaction, he turned to the crowd.

  “Someone bring me my valise,” he requested.

  “Your what?” someone drunkenly responded.

  “That satchel I got,” he said.

  Someone tossed him a cracked bag of brown leather, which landed at his feet. He bent down and reached inside, his hands shuffling through the bag, its contents clanking together noisily.

  “You always carry around a satch of tools?” asked Loat.

  “I do,” the trucker said cheerily. His hands burrowed deeper into the bag until he brought out a long curved knife that looked like no knife anyone in the crowd had ever seen. The handle was titanium, but the blade stemming up was white steel, and bent at an odd angle. It appeared almost like a slender silvery trout. “Now see, it’s no telling what the world will throw at you,” he said. “I like to be ready for whatever it is.” He leaned down beside the goat, lifted the animal’s hind leg, and slid the knife across its groin. The crowd jawed and yammered as the animal’s blood blackened the ground. “Now see, they say a man ain’t got but two things to do and that’s live and die, but I believe we are all of us better suited to the dying part than to the living.” The trucker continued making angled cuts across the goat’s gut. “There’a start and a finish to ever thing, but that finish is gone last lots longer than that beginning, ain’t it? That makes a man wonder, is he supposed to live or is he supposed to die? Now see, a goat is carried about in the same rude form as any man.” He paused and looked up at the crowd. “Or maybe man’s form is ruder.”

  “All I’m seeing you do is butcher a goat,” Loat said, “but you’re talking about men. There’s a difference.”

  The trucker cocked his head as if listening for something faint and distant, then slapped the goat’s flank and went on with the knife, slicing away the peritoneum and the greater and lesser omentums before going further into the body cavity. After a few moments, he brought out the kidney, small, oblong and pale, about the size of a coin purse. He then knotted off the bladder tube and the blood vessels before producing from his coat pocket a spool of clean silver thread.

  “Sheep gut,” he announced. He threaded a needle and sewed the gash in the goat closed. When he was finished, he stood, dusted himself off, and carried the kidney over to Loat. “You wanted to know if I could do the job,” he said. “Here’s your evidence.”

  Loat leaned forward and poked the kidney with his finger. “Yeah,” he said, “I see you’ve dug the thing out of that goat. But I ain’t seen the goat come around just yet.”

  The trucker tucked the kidney into his pocket. “He’s fine,” he said. “Give him a spell and he’ll wobble back to us.”

  Loat shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he grunted. He drew himself up from the lounge chair and teetered over to Samhill. He lifted the animal’s hind leg and examined the newly stitched gash just below the inner thigh. A slick trickle of blood wept out.

  “This goat here looks finished,” he said, glaring back at the trucker. “You’ve killed Samhill Doug.”

  The crowd groaned. A few tossed away their drinks in disgust.

  “He’s not dead,” the trucker declared. “Give him a rest and then tend his wound and let him have a good long drink of cold water once he comes around. You’ll see.”

  “Yeah,” Loat said doubtfully. “We’ll see, wo
n’t we?”

  Over the next hour, the wind increased, bailing the hay grass out in the field beyond the gravel lot and bringing in the sweet smell of rain. Except for Loat and Daryl, the crowd drifted away. Eventually, the trucker went over to Samhill. He knelt beside his bag and brought out a small vial of frosted glass. “Now see, this is a special kind of smelling salt,” he said. “My own recipe.” He bent over the goat, wafting the vial under its snout. At first, the billy only continued its long, labored breathing. Then it began to snort. Very shortly, it lifted its head and bellowed a throaty dolorous moan. The trucker then tugged gingerly at the leash and the goat staggered upright, still bawling, its head wagging groggily. “Here he is, gentlemen.” He brought the animal over to Loat and handed him the leash.

  Loat looked down at the animal as it gnawed a stem of clover at his feet. “Goddamn,” he laughed.

  “But there’s one more thing,” the trucker said. He reached into his pocket and took out the kidney. “The true test of any creature is to see what it will do with its own.” He dropped the kidney in the grass beside Samhill. The goat nudged the organ with his snout, then quickly ate it.

  “Now see,” said the trucker. “He’s his own being. Mastery over the self is proved through a defilement of the self.” He said something else, but the sound of the rain surging out of the bottoms blurred his words, and soon the wind wove tresses of dust about the men as if they were corpses being bound in bedsheets.

  “We best get inside,” Daryl said. He and Loat retreated into the dry cavern of the Quonset hut. Loat led the goat back to the stage, tethering the leash to one of the bedposts.

  The crowd milled about, jerking and spasming, yawing laughter out. Bottles clinked.

  Daryl waddled up behind Loat and nudged his shoulder. “You aim to lay for Beam and draw a kidney out of him, don’t you?” he said.

  Loat turned and faced him. “That’s what I plan to do.”

  “And you’re satisfied that trucker can take it out of Beam and put it into you?”

  “I don’t aim to have him put it in me,” Loat said. “I get that kidney out of Beam, I put it on ice and take it to one of these county doctors that’s so fond of the whores out here. Put the squeeze on him that way. He won’t ask where I got the sonuvabitching kidney from. So long as I don’t go tell his wife about the whores, he’ll do whatever I say.” Loat wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “I thought all I had left to do was wait to die. Then Derna told me about Beam being mine and that changed things.”

  “You think she’s telling the truth?”

  “About Beam? Yes. I know she is. An old mama cat crawled in my window last night and said it was the truth.”

  Daryl folded his stumps together. “I’ve noticed it’s a fair amount of old mama cats coming round you lately.”

  “It ain’t nothing for you to worry over,” said Loat. “I keep my own sort of company.”

  “I guess that’s so.”

  Loat laughed. “Hell, Daryl. I didn’t know better I’d think you were actually concerned for my wellbeing and not just riding out your last dollar-making days.”

  Daryl wiped his nose with a pink moist stump. “It don’t make no nevermind to me,” he said. “You go on and do what you see fit.”

  “I plan to,” said Loat.

  He turned away from the stage and went to the bar. The keep gave him a thermos of ice water and a clean washrag, which Loat took with him as he moved back into the hallway, walking down to the final door on the left. Inside the room, Ella lay awake on a king size bed, her hands and ankles roped to the corner posts so that she appeared splashed across the mattress. Loat shut the door behind him and brought a chair to the edge of the bed. He sat studying her quietly. Her face was swollen, but the blood had been toweled from her cheeks and her cuts doctored with ointment.

  Loat uncapped the thermos and poured some water into the lid. He seemed to puzzle over something as the breath turned inside him in long grunts. He then bent forward, holding the water out to her.

  “It’s only water,” he said. “You need to drink it.”

  He caught her face and she tried to twist away, but she soon quieted and let him pour the water down her throat. When she’d finished, he tipped the thermos and damped the washrag and began daubing her down, wiping the cool cloth over her cheeks, his eyes still and determined as if he sought to bring to her a fragile health.

  Ella stared at the ceiling. The white plaster was stained with water so that it seemed like some dingy cartographic rendering of lands no longer extant, boundaries now gone and undone.

  “Do you know who I am?” Loat asked.

  Ella nodded.

  “That’s good,” he said. “That way I don’t have to waste no time explaining the kind of trouble you’re in.”

  Ella remained silent. She didn’t know if she’d spoken at all since waking in this bed, though she had some vague recollection of mumbling to strange visitors at her bedside, but those conversations that now had the slow drifty feel of dreams.

  “I reckon you know your daddy’s dead,” said Loat. “And since you know that, I’m guessing you’re thinking you might be dead yourself before too awful long.” Loat shifted in the chair, the wooden floor creaking beneath him. “But that don’t have to be the way things turn out. You can walk away from this once it’s over. It’s up to you. If you tell me where Beam went, I’ll let you flap your wings and fly away home, little birdie.”

  “I don’t know where he went,” Ella said quietly.

  “You’ll have to do better than that, little birdie. I know he was out at Pete’s. Otherwise, things wouldn’t have turned into such a shit circus out there.”

  “If that’s what you know, then you know as much I do.”

  Loat brushed his hands over his lap. “I think you got a pair of balls bigger than most menfolks I know. But that’s nothing to be proud about. Biggest part of men are cowards. Boil them down and you get yellow bones and not much else.” He leaned forward, close to her face. “I’d sure hate to have to boil you down and see what was inside, little birdie.”

  “You’re going to do whatever it is you please so why don’t you just go ahead and get it over with instead of sitting there jawing?”

  “I was kindly enjoying the conversation. I’m sore pressed to find good talk these days.”

  “You want to know about Beam?” she said. “He ran when he had the chance. He left me. That’s what I know about Beam.”

  “Is that so? Well, I think maybe you just proved my point about men.” Loat reached out and touched her arm. She drew away, but the fetters held her in place and he grabbed her, his fingers brittle and dry against her skin. “So Beam ran. But you’re not telling me where he ran off to.”

  “I don’t have any idea about that. Ask me, I hope he’s lying in a ditch with his neck broke.”

  “I don’t believe that’s likely.”

  “Well, it don’t matter. And I sure don’t see what you want with him.”

  “He’s carrying something for me. Something I need.”

  Ella looked at him. His cheeks were washed out and ashen, his eyes jaundiced and runny as egg yolks. “You best find him soon, then,” she said. “From the looks of it, you’re about to fall over dead.”

  Loat pulled away from her. His eyes narrowed and he fixed his teeth together. “I’m finer than some folks I see,” he said, nodding at Ella.

  “I guess.” She grimaced doubtfully.

  Loat stood quickly, the chair clattering behind him, a rage unfurling in his eyes. “You know, I’m tired of your mouth,” he spat. “I’m tired of you playing dumb with me. You think I’m ’most dead? Well, I believe I’ll show you how much man is left in me.” He began to unbuckle his belt, his cracked pale fingers rasping against the tarnished brass.

  Ella shook her head slowly as a murmur of protest rose in her throat. “Stop,” she whispered. “Don’t do this.”

  “Not so tough now, little birdie,” he said.

  He tore
at her clothes, his grunts coming loud and brash, his breath falling upon her thin and cool.

  Ella closed her eyes as the world spun away in a crash of blinding light.

  XXIII

  MONDAY

  Derna sat inside the cabin, guiding the ferry. She listened to the passengers chatter on deck, a woman and her two children, both fledgling boys amazed at the scooting of a boat through water. They had come down the landing in a clunking red Le Baron, and once they boarded the ferry and it began to move, the boys erupted from their seat to clutch at the railings and pitch wish-pennies into the river’s brown foam.

  Derna slackened the throttle and hoped for quiet. It was the one thing that seemed in ready supply around the river, and she had learned to covet the long petering days of silence, hoarding their memory like winter provender. She’d come to view her unaccompanied hours aboard the ferry as both pleasure and penance, a time to sift through all the wrong runs her life had made—the whoring, Loat, these last years with Clem beside the Gasping, bearing travelers between the shores.

  She kept a Bible in the cabin. Though she hardly read from the book, she thought of how something so heavy made a good tool for discipline. Loat had beaten her once with a King James. She put her hand on it now. It didn’t feel like much, just a book of ageless bound verses. It couldn’t be much. But it was. Because it had to be. Because when there had been nothing left for a woman of her sort to clutch to, it had been there.

  But then, those thoughts went away. There was a man on the landing. He stood beside the cleats where she wound the safety chains, his jeans crusted with dried blood. At first, she didn’t believe it was him. It was only some trick of the morning, a phantom man standing above the current drumming the shores, the sheen of the water floating over him so that he seemed to walk toward her in disregard of the deeps of the river.

  But then she did believe. And she knew. It would happen this way, she thought, as she cut the throttle and stepped onto the deck. It would be him returning again to the same crease of water he had always known and could never forget. It would have to be this way.