The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  “Here we are,” Loat said. “What you going to do now, Elvis?”

  Elvis dropped the bullhorn and it clattered on the roadway. He drew his revolver. “Let the woman go,” he ordered, aiming the gun at Loat.

  Loat shoved his pistol hard against the underside of the woman’s jaw. “I’ll do that when you give me Beam.”

  Sweat dropped into Elvis’ left eye. He winked it away. “Let her go,” he said.

  “Not until Beam is sitting in this rig here. That’s who I want.”

  “You don’t get him,” Elvis answered. “What you get to do is let the woman go and then drop your piece and lay down on the pavement. We got back-up coming.”

  Loat squeezed out a grin. “I don’t hear no sirens,” he said. “Look here, Elvis.” Loat ran the gun barrel down the woman’s neck tenderly. “I can blow this woman’s brains all over the corn and then go home and eat a cold supper and get to sleep just fine. Who the fuck do you think I am? I ain’t some redneck drunk on jar shine. You know me. I ain’t some nightmare you can wash away with a cold shower.”

  Before he finished speaking, Filback swung out of the cruiser, bringing the Benelli to his shoulder and holding it on Loat.

  “Steady,” Elvis barked, holding a hand out toward Filback. “Just breathe.”

  Filback nodded, his cheek bulging against the shotgun’s stock. “I’m right here,” he said, his voice cool and certain.

  “Y’all gonna have to do a sight more than just stand there and breathe.” Loat shoved the pistol into the woman’s neck and she mewled helplessly. “Give me Beam or things are fixing to get real messy.”

  Elvis braced himself against the side of the cruiser. He couldn’t think straight. All he could do was hold his revolver on Loat and wait for Filback to get loose and nervous while the corn shook and rattled below the shoulder of the road.

  Then the trucker stepped down from the rig. He walked into the cast of the headlights, dressed glossily in the tails of his fitted blazer, his white shirt collar wagging around his clean throat, the wind knocking his hair back. His shadow sloped over the pavement. “Evening, Sheriff,” he said.

  Elvis knew him at once as the man from the courthouse, the one he’d had the puzzling encounter with not three days before. He aimed the revolver at his chest. “Lay down,” he said. “Lay down on the road there and don’t say anything.”

  The trucker put his hands on his hips, swinging his coattails out. “Now see, I can’t do that. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to help you. And I’m a man that’s all about helping others.” With the headlights at his back, the trucker was only a silhouette, and his voice seemed to emerge in a whirlwind out of the darkness. “Here is what you can do,” he said, folding his hands in front of him. “You can give us Beam and then we’ll let the woman go. Or you can stand there waving your little cap gun until one of us, me or Loat or your deputy there, loses his cool and gets jumpy. People get hurt when they get jumpy. You give us Beam and everybody can just drive away from all this. Now see, wouldn’t that be fine?”

  Elvis felt his head lighten. His vision blurred so that he couldn’t clearly make out the corn or the road that stretched out before him. He felt as if he stood on the verge of a vast chasm of plummeting darkness and that he would surely soon plunge forever into that spinning emptiness. The sound of Beam kicking the cruiser’s rear window brought him back. He stuck his head inside the car. Beam was lying on his back, looking up at him through the chickenwire.

  “Let me out of here,” he said. His eyes sparked with flinty light.

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t care. I know that woman.”

  “I know who she is, too. She’s Ella Daugherty. What difference does it make?”

  “I know her,” Beam repeated. “You’ve got to let me out. I want to go.”

  “They’ll kill the both of you.”

  “I need to get out.”

  “Pete’s dead,” Elvis said. “You will be too if you go with Loat.”

  “I know Pete’s dead. And I know what all will happen to me if I go with Loat. But this is something I need to fix. You just let me out and I’ll go.”

  Elvis stared at Beam, who had a coldly adamant look on his face, and knew this was something he’d reasoned out and that there was no stopping him. He opened the door, and Beam stepped out of the car. He started walking toward the rig, but Elvis stayed him with a hand. “Hold up. I need to take the cuffs off you.” Elvis fumbled with the keys.

  “Just leave those binders on him, Elvis,” Loat said. “Be easier for us that way.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Elvis said. “These cuffs are county property.”

  “You need not to worry about what does or doesn’t belong to the county right now, Elvis,” Loat said. “You better just think about how you can get this whole shit mess cleaned up without nobody getting their brains blowed out.”

  “I won’t do it,” Elvis said. “You can have him, but you’ll take him without the cuffs. That’s the only deal you get.”

  Loat sighed and looked at the trucker.

  “Do it,” the trucker said.

  Loat waved his hand and Elvis unlocked the cuffs and took them from Beam’s wrists. “You ain’t got to do this,” he whispered.

  Beam shook his head. “Yes I do.”

  “If we can stall, back-up will be here.” But Beam was already walking into the lights of the rig.

  “The fuck you doing, Elvis?” Filback asked.

  “Shut up. This don’t need any of your reckoning.”

  When Beam stood in front of Loat, close enough so the two men seemed to merge and become one, he said, “You can let her go now.”

  “Stand between me and the sheriff,” Loat answered. “Anybody gets shot, it’s going to be you.”

  Beam sidestepped into place.

  “That’s good,” Loat said. “Now move on up here until you’re close enough to breathe on this bitch.” The trucker returned to the rig, stowing himself behind the wheel.

  Beam shuffled forward, his boots dragging on the gritty pavement. He saw Ella clearly now. Her clothes looked as if they’d been glued to her in haste. Wrinkled blouse. Hair a woven mess. Eyes swollen, blood crusted on the same denim shorts she’d been wearing when Beam first met her. He remembered their night on the sofa. It was all dizzy in its distance now, and he wondered how he had ever been there, naked with a strange woman as the moonlight slid through the window blinds.

  “Turn around,” Loat said. Beam did as he was told. He could see Elvis now. He’d cocked his gun and was holding it at arm’s length. The blue cruiser lights slid over him in deep currents. Then Beam heard Ella’s breathing at his back. A warm wheeze. When Loat released her, she ran forward, then slumped onto her knees, catching herself with her palms on the pavement. A small choked sob rose from her throat, but Beam could do nothing to help her.

  “Walk back with me,” Loat told him, jabbing the gun into his spine.

  They went to the truck. Beam climbed up the running board first and got into the rig, seating himself beside the trucker, who held a Heckler pistol in his lap.

  Loat whistled and the dog bounded up into the cab. Then he raised himself onto the running board.

  “You won’t come looking for me, Elvis,” he yelled. “You want Beam to go on living you won’t come looking. I see squad cars anywhere near me and I’ll put a slug in him. I won’t ask questions. I’ll just do it. That clear?”

  Elvis confirmed no understanding. He kept his gun on Loat, gauging the distance, the wind. He considered angles. The control of formulaic velocity.

  When he pulled the trigger, the shot went high and ricocheted off the truck’s roof with a whine. Loat dumped into the cab and swung the door closed and then Filback let go on the windshield with the Benelli, the glass turning frosty. Elvis fired again and one of the rig’s tires blew. Then the gears ground and the Peterbilt leapt forward. Elvis and Filback jumped away as the rig smashed into the cruiser, sweeping it down i
nto the road ditch in a smatter of windows and headlamps.

  Elvis ran to Ella and dragged her into the soft grass of the ditch. She moaned in pain when he touched her. He squatted and covered her with himself, his face shoved into the mud. Pistol rounds slapped the corn behind him, then the Benelli roared again and buckshot splatted against the truck before it turned and slurred off down the highway, the steel belt of the blown tire flapping and then flinging off with a shudder, a rage of sparks scattering out in a bright swarm from the wheel as the noise and light of the rig slowly shrank away into the blackness.

  Elvis pulled himself off the ground. The cruiser steamed in the ditch. Its roof lights spun on in blue shivers. Filback staggered up to him, holding his shotgun limply. Gray smoke grew from the gun’s barrel, and slicks of dark blood draped his left arm. He’d taken one just above the elbow and the wound bled profusely.

  “Easy Filback.” Elvis took the gun from him and laid it on the ground. “Sit down,” he said.

  Filback crumpled to the pavement. His face was clear and still, not a flicker of agony or movement crossing it. He laid his head back on the road. “It don’t hurt,” he mumbled. “It don’t hurt at all.”

  Elvis went to the cruiser. He tried to radio an ambulance, but the channels were only hot spray. He let the remote dangle and searched the car. Under the driver’s seat, he found a medical kit. He opened it and pilfered through the gauze and stitching equipment, the poultice bandaging. Ibuprofen in a bottle. Morphine syringes. Scissors. Antivenin for snakebites. A tourniquet. He closed the kit and carried it back to Filback. His cheeks were shaking now as shock took him. Elvis laid the kit beside him. He brought the tourniquet out and fixed it around Filback’s arm, wrapping the banding rubber tightly above the wound and then cinching it with his teeth and knotting it off as the blood slipped warmly between his fingers.

  “It don’t hurt,” Filback repeated.

  “It will,” Elvis said. He punched a morphine syringe into Filback’s arm.

  When he’d done all he could for Filback, Elvis sat down on the pavement. He closed his eyes. Far off, sirens. A red shriek in the night. He knew he should get up and go to Ella, that he should comfort her in some way, put a hand on her and remove whatever nightmares flushed through her mind, but he only sat there with his eyes shut, hearing the sirens and waiting for some kind of dream to come out of the night and the corn to take him away from all this.

  XXV

  The smell of blood was thick inside the rig. Loat leaned against the passenger side door, gritting his teeth. A few pellets from Filback’s shotgun had glanced his neck, and he kept a hand over the wound as it bled between his fingers. Enoch, the Doberman, tried to lick at the blood until Loat slapped the dog away and it slunk into the floorboards.

  “Good that you can do that,” said the trucker.

  Loat looked at him. “Do what?”

  “Hit the dog. Means your spine is okay. The shot either nicked you or only wedged in the muscle.” The trucker grinned. “No worries so long as you don’t bleed to death.”

  Loat put his head against the cold window and watched the dark runnel by. More corn. Trailers. A tin warehouse haloed by a security light. The glow of a soda machine. Corn again.

  “Don’t talk to me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to have to answer you because it fucking hurts to talk.”

  The trucker laughed softly. “I’ll just talk to Beam, then.”

  Beam sat between the two men, staring ahead at the road. If he so much as shifted his weight the Doberman muttered a low growl, so he remained motionless.

  “I guess you thought you and me was done, hey?” the trucker asked him. “But here you are.” The trucker slapped Beam’s knee. “Right back with me riding in the wild country.”

  Beam wadded his hands together in his lap and did not speak.

  Loat lifted his head. “We all need to just shut the fuck up and ride and not talk until we get to where we’re going,” he said. The blood dripped like the beads of a rosary.

  “He’ll be okay,” the trucker said. “But I don’t guess you’re too worried about that, are you?”

  Beam shook his head. “No,” he said. “I ain’t.”

  “Now see, you’re probably just curious about why we’ve been so eager to get a hold of you. I mean, Christ, I shot a deputy back there. Feller don’t act that way less he got reason to.”

  “I know why you been after me,” Beam said. His voice surprised him in its steadiness.

  “Do you, now?”

  “Yes.” He nodded and pushed himself hard against the seat, holding his breath. All the while, he’d been smelling Loat’s blood and he knew now it was his own blood and that it flashed inside him with a heat and a power stronger than any prayer he might have offered to the quick and silent dark.

  “Well, then you know you did your own brother in. But where are we taking you and why do we want to take you there?”

  “I don’t know.” Beam shrugged. “Maybe you’re going to kill me.”

  The road dipped suddenly and the tires whined as the rig staggered through a curve.

  “Now see,” said the trucker, “that just might be the case. I got a mite of a bone to pick with you and maybe killing is the only way that bone gets picked.” He turned onto an unmarked highway hedged by weedy banks of thin sumac and mimosa. The headlights of the truck flared against rain puddled in the dip of a bend. Vagrant moon fluxing bright and dim through the tree limbs, the road granular beneath. The sky coarsened by stars. No houses. Distant barns rising on the hillsides. “I can’t abide anyone calling me a thief,” he continued. “Now see, it’s true that I took that money off you while you was sleeping in my truck. But I didn’t steal it.”

  “You don’t call that stealing?”

  “No sir. I give you a ride, so the money was just a payment for services rendered. Hell, you’re a businessman yourself, running that ferry. You ought to understand a fair price for fair work.”

  “I usually say upfront what a job costs before I lay a hand to it.”

  “Now see, I knew you’d say something like that. But here’s the way it is, see. I give you this ride and we’re rolling down the highway and all of the sudden you start to sleeping. Right there in my cab. Now see, a sleeping man ain’t shit for company. Way I figure, I’m owed at least a small dollar for driving your lazy ass around.” The trucker waved his arm through the cab. “I can’t be giving rides to lazy folk and not expect to get paid. And expect to get paid without having my good name run through the mud and be called a thief and all manner of unpopular and outright untruthful things. Don’t you see what I’m talking about here?”

  Beam flexed his hands in his lap. At his feet, Enoch had begun to snooze. Loat remained slouched against the passenger window. His breath cast erratic glazes on the cold glass while the road seemed to slip and dive through a country of strange sleep.

  As the road came on, bearing him toward whatever place he’d finally be done in forever, the thought of his death jolted through him like a polished blade and in one motion he reached over and jerked the wheel so the rig surged from the road into the bank and a long howl boiled up from the gutworks of the machine as it rolled from the roadway and plunged into a ravine, felling cedars and sapling hickory as it flumed downward with a wavy surge of black soil rising in its wake until it turned upright again and stalled against a girthy oak. Then, nothing but a trickle of noises. Fluids. Gear oil. Antifreeze. Diesel. The drip slithery in the dark. A hiss of water slapping hot metal.

  Beam was sprawled on his back across the dash. The windshield had broken free and the glass had scraped his arms, but his injuries felt slight and he managed to raise his head. Loat lay wedged against the passenger side door. His eyes were open and for a moment, Beam believed him dead until he blinked and then worked his jaw, twisting it open and closed. He leaned forward and spat a bloody clot onto his lap.

  “The fuck you do?” he slurred.
<
br />   “Wrecked us,” Beam said.

  “The fuck for?”

  “So you wouldn’t kill me.”

  Loat choked and spat again, his lips reddened with blood. He wiped his mouth with his wrist. A pistol gleamed in his fist.

  “How bad you hurt?” Loat asked.

  Beam lifted a hand to his face and scraped a seam of blood away. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe not too bad.”

  “I think I made it out all right myself. Might have knocked a few of my fillings loose, though.” Loat closed his mouth and slowly worked his jaw some more. “We got to get out of here,” he said. “They’ll be looking for us.”

  Beam shifted his hips and a hot shank of pain slid through him, all the way down to his heels. “Go on then,” he managed to say.

  “You’re coming with me. And anyway, that windshield’s the only way out. Driver’s door looks stove in and mine over here is blocked by this oak tree. So we’re both going to have to crawl out.” Loat swept the pistol through the air. “Go on ahead.”

  Beam rolled onto his side. The frame of the windshield was torn, and bits of glass clung to it like jagged teeth. Beam struggled through the opening, the glass cutting his hands and belly, and then slid down the hood into a soft nest of black dirt. He nearly passed out, but he steadied himself and walked from the rig to rest against a fallen hackberry log.

  “Now, that’s lots better, ain’t it?” Loat’s voice swam to him through the dark as he staggered toward Beam through the dead leaves and broken limbs. He held his wounded neck with one hand and the pistol in the other, and the blood draped over his shoulders like a stole so that he appeared sanctified and holy in the silver moonlight. “That fucking rig ain’t worth pissing on.” Loat arched his back, then leaned forward and spat blood on the ground. “Where is everybody else?” he coughed. “You didn’t see that trucker or my dog anywheres?”