The Marble Orchard

by Alex Taylor

  “There weren’t nobody else that I saw.”

  Loat pushed two fingers under his tongue and whistled. When the dog didn’t appear, Loat whistled again and waited and listened. Only the wind spun and chattered in the leaves. “Enoch,” he called into the night, but the dog didn’t emerge. Loat spat and shook his head. “Fucking dog,” he said. He lifted his eyes and stared through the trees at the ravine where the saplings were broken and the earth gouged and rutted. “Come on.” He waved the pistol. “We got to get up to the road.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we got to get the fuck out of here. Don’t tell me you want to stand out here in the woods and bleed all night.”

  Beam gripped the hackberry log under him. “I guess that depends on what you aim to do once we get up to the road,” he said.

  “You ain’t got no say in this,” Loat said. His voice moved through the night with a reedy hiss. “You come along and follow me now.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  Beam squished his hands into the damp moss that grew on the hackberry log. “I don’t believe so,” he said.

  “Don’t, do you?”

  “No. If you aimed to just kill me you’d already done it.”

  Loat drew the slide back on the pistol and shucked a round into the chamber. He aimed the gun at Beam’s chest. “Go on and talk then if you think I’m all bluff.”

  The wind slid off the top of the ridge and into the ravine to cool the sweat on Beam’s cheeks, and he felt suddenly chilled to the core, staring at the bore of the pistol, but he shook his head slow and easily. “I’m your blood,” he said.

  Loat stood poised before him, his breath labored and ragged through the tiny vents of his nostrils.

  “I’m your blood,” Beam repeated.

  Loat lowered the pistol. “More than that,” he said. “I’m your daddy.”

  “That’s right.” Beam said. “And you’re the daddy of that one I killed.”

  The night clicked and chimed around them so that it seemed as if they were standing in the belly of a ponderous clock, the hours timed not of this world and measured not by its ways.

  “I’m sick,” Loat said. “I’m dying. The doctors say my kidneys are ruined. So I need one from you. I was aiming to get it out of Paul, but you damn sure put a stop to that.”

  “You want one of my kidneys?” Beam asked. “That’s what all this had been about? All this killing had been on account of you not wanting to die?”

  “What other reason is there for doing anything?” said Loat. “It’s why people steal, cheat, and rob. It’s why they fuck. Anything to make a stand against not being alive. When it comes your time, don’t act like you won’t be doing your damnedest to keep yourself in the world.”

  “You think I’m just going to give you one of my kidneys?” Beam said.

  Loat snorted. “I don’t think,” he said, “that you’ve got much of any say in it.”

  “It’s my kidney. I reckon I say where it does or doesn’t go.”

  “You just ain’t as quick as you ought to be.” Loat raised the gun. “This here is what does the only kind of saying that needs to get heard.”

  “You shoot me and you won’t get any kidney.”

  “That’s true. And don’t think I ain’t seen the itch in your step. You’re wanting to run. But if you do that, you better think of what I already done and what I can do to them you leave behind.” Loat ran his tongue over his lips. “You better think what I can do to Derna.”

  The trees shook and waved like brooms that would sweep the sky clear of stars and make of this a blacker night yet. Beam planted his feet in the firm dirt. He could go if he wanted. The woods were open. The thick and shadow-tangled world would hide him. But what world was there that could keep him for more than the respite of a few days? His body ached and his mind staggered dizzy with the thought of the horror his life had become, a horror so certain and absolute that it stood within him like the very frame of his bones. He saw how it was and how it would be. There was no earthly way to run. No earthly place worth running to. And there was Derna. She was old and worn and deserved whatever measure of peace he could give her in whatever hours remained to him.

  Beam lifted himself from the hackberry log. He moved forward and Loat fell in behind him. They went slow under the trees, the moon dusting them with gray shadows as the elm saplings and sawbriers ripped at their clothes. They climbed through scrub brush and the surf of foam flowers and sedge and more Johnson grass until finally the crumbled shoulder of the road appeared where the trucker sat perched on a stray tire waiting for them with a wry and scant smile. Between his thighs sat Enoch. The trucker stroked the dog’s ears. “Now see, some take less time to climb a hill than others,” he announced. “But it’s not any trouble. I don’t mind waiting.”

  Beam and Loat stared at him incredulously. “How’d you come out of that wreck so clean?” Loat asked. He and Beam were crooked and stove to varying degrees, yet the trucker seemed polished and showered.

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Well, it don’t matter,” Loat said. “Let’s just walk.” He whistled and Enoch sprang from the trucker’s grasp and followed at a trot as they all began to walk along the shoulder.

  “Did you think you’d kill us all by wrecking my rig?” the trucker said to Beam.

  “I think it’s a wonder somebody ain’t never loaded you with double-ought and throwed you down a hole somewhere. That’s what I think,” Beam answered.

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  “What wouldn’t?”

  “Shooting me and throwing me down a hole.” The trucker shook his head. “It’s been tried before.”

  “Whatever,” Beam said. “I don’t care one way or the other.”

  They walked a little while longer in silence until a pair of headlights shone on them and a long, white Buick pulled up. The driver’s face flared pale in the window. A cigarette seeped orange light over his lips. He wore glasses and a blue cotton shirt, the collar smudged with lipstick, his salt-colored hair wafting in and out of the gusting wind. He was older, but not so old that he seemed feeble. A slight beery smell rose off him. “You boys having trouble?” he asked.

  Loat bowed, squinting into the car. He took a few steps forward and examined the backseat. It was empty, save for a throw rug piled on the vinyl. “You might could say that,” he said.

  The driver took the cigarette from his lips and coughed into a wadded fist of brown fingers. “You look it,” he said. “What’d y’all do, wreck?”

  “What are you doing out here?” Loat asked.

  “Me? Hell, I’m just driving around in the fresh air. Got done taking my old lady home and now I’m riding back to my place.” The driver waved a hand. “What are y’all doing out here?” He thumped the cigarette and it shattered in the road.

  Loat put a hand into the small of his back and winced. “We need a ride,” he said.

  The man in the car coughed again. “Yeah,” he said. “And from the looks of it, I guess you need to go to a hospital.”

  “Not to no hospital.” Loat shook his head. “We need a ride to a cemetery.”

  The driver put both hands on the steering wheel. “A cemetery? Who’s dead out there?”

  “Nobody’s dead,” said Loat.

  “Then why you want to go to a cemetery?”

  “It don’t matter why. You just need to take us.”

  “Well, I never heard of nobody wanting to go to a cemetery just for the hell of it. Are you sure there ain’t nobody dead out there?”

  Loat shook his head. “We’re all alive. Now take us to a cemetery.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I can be a party to that,” said the driver. “There’s some strange folks around these days. I ain’t saying you’re some of them. But then again, you might be. You know what I read in the paper the other day? They was a man up in Ohio got caught fucking his dead wife. Dug her up from the ground and just went to
hunching on her right there in the dirt.” The driver narrowed his eyes. “You sure you ain’t got a dead girl out there with you?”

  Loat spat onto the road. “Take us to the cemetery,” he said.

  “I can’t do that,” the man said.

  “You’re gonna take us to a cemetery.”

  A match snickered. The flame curled brightly as the driver lit another cigarette. “I ain’t going to no graveyard,” he said.

  Loat leaned against the car, like a hawker pushing his wares. “Whatever it is you want that don’t matter none. We are going and you’re going to take us.”

  The man hung his arm out the car window and flicked ash into the road. “I ain’t,” he said. The moonlight fell off his glasses and slid murkily down his cheeks. “I don’t even know who y’all are.”

  “We’re getting in,” Loat said. He pulled the pistol from his jeans, and the shot splashed blue flame over the car and lit the interior. The top of the driver’s head tore away. Blood washed over the dash and windshield. The man slumped forward over the wheel and the horn blared. Between his fingers dangling out the window, the cigarette still smoldered, a small red dot in the middle of the night.

  Loat opened the door and grabbed the man’s shirt collar and yanked him into the road. “Grab his feet,” he said to Beam. “Pull him into the woods.” He motioned toward the trees with the pistol, but Beam didn’t move. “Now,” Loat commanded.

  Beam went to the body. Where the man’s face had been there was now only a squashed damp black hole. Somehow, it was odd to think of the body as being a man, or even what was left of one. But it was a man. The shirt with its cotton collar smudged with lipstick, the jeans—all of this was what a man would wear. And now Beam would have to pick up his legs and drag him off the highway into the woods. And, in some dim time yet to come, there would only be a cage of sun-washed bones in the ditch and then that would be all.

  He lifted the man’s legs, struggling with the weight as he wheelbarrowed him toward the forest. The man’s watch scraped on the pavement until Beam reached the edge of the woods.

  “That’s good enough,” Loat said. “Now get your ass in the car.”

  Beam wiped his hands against his thighs and quickly returned to the car and placed himself in the passenger seat. The trucker sat behind the wheel. In the back, Loat had laid himself out on the seat while Enoch panted on the floorboards.

  “Take note of what just happened, Beam,” said the trucker. He yanked the gearshift into drive and they rolled out, the car’s bald tires squelching on the pavement. “Loat will speak a blunt tongue if the moment calls for it.”

  Beam put his head against the window and the cool glass stung his skin. All he had done—the killing on the ferry and the days and nights of running—whirled about him in a cloud until he became lightheaded and sick. He tried to sit straight in the seat, but his movements seemed hindered and sluggish, and he felt the slow drown of sleep coming on.

  “Stop,” he whispered. “I need to get out. I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Now see,” said the trucker, “there just ain’t no time to stop. There ain’t no time at all.”

  Beam swallowed the bile down and shook his head. “You got to let me out,” he said.

  “No, we ain’t letting you out,” Loat said from the backseat. “We’re taking you to a real special place and we got some real special plans for you.”

  Beam dizzied and coughed and his head stirred with a frenzied light as they drove on, the trees knotty and arthritic as they traveled down the corridors of a night provoked to forever vortex by those at large within the darkness.

  XXVI

  Beam didn’t know at first if he was awake or if he had somehow trespassed into the realm of nightmare. The latter thought gave him some comfort. He was only an interloper ranging into the mind’s far wilds, traipsing through the weedy bottom ground of a country strange and hostile, but it was only a dream country that would water away in the day’s breaking. But then a clear pain burned at the back of his eyeballs, and he knew that he was awake.

  The sound of water troubling stones brought him round to a dim consciousness. He lay on cold marble. There was a smell of bat guano and damp earth. He tried to raise himself, but his hands and feet were hobbled by coarse hemp ropes and he could only lift his head. A lantern burned at his feet, a pallid fire curled inside a bowl of glass like a sprout of swamp grass. Voices and footsteps scuffled together in the darkness, perhaps the clopping of hooves, the quick broken nicker of a goat. In the cast of the lantern’s flame, he saw that he was naked.

  He let his head down. The heat of the pain burned off and then slid through him coldly. The voices muttered, then melded with the sound of the water as it slipped over the marble until neither was distinguishable from the other. Shadows reared and then died on the walls about him like the guttering light of a furnace that burned only murk.

  He turned his head to his right. Someone was beside him, sprawled in a posture of sleep, their mouth gaped open.

  “Hey,” Beam whispered. “Hey, you awake?” It was agony to speak.

  Only the echo of water answered.

  “Where are we?” Beam asked.

  “Don’t ask that.” Someone spoke from the other side of the room. Beam turned his head and a form rose from the wall. It came and lifted the lantern, and the trucker appeared suddenly, his eyes fixed and steady orbs, no different than the clean blank eyes of marble cherubim. “You know where you are,” he said, his voice a slither.

  Beam tried to raise himself again, but the ropes held him and the pain thundered in his head. He pulled and struggled, but it was useless and he soon slumped breathless against the stone. “Where am I?” he whispered.

  Turning again to the figure lying beside him, he saw in the span of withered lantern light that there was no one there at all, only a blanched and empty skull.

  EPILOGUE

  The days grew wizened and then the frosts came. Elvis noticed the change as it arrived in slow intervals—the leaves dropping their green and flashing to fire and then to mute brown and falling in vast endless clutters and sweeping over lawns and streets and pastures, the corn in the river bottoms grown rickety and skeletal, the slight glaze of ice appearing in a lacey veil on his windows each morning, the world aging into a pale fragility, and when the wind shook the grasses and empty winter trees they seemed to tremble with the burden of knowing something weighty and awful. Clans of robins moved south. Jaybirds and grackles as well. All things in flight from this place, seeking a warmer clime innocent of cold.

  He kept to his appointed routes. In the cruiser, with the heater blowing and the radio squawking its bored talk, he drove and drove, knocking miles of roadway down until the distance seemed to accrue into a kind of sleep, a travel-bartered reprieve from thought and dream.

  On occasion, he went to a bluff overlooking the Gasping River, a pull-off of gray dirt scattered with beer bottles and spent condoms. From there, he would sit and look out over the water. Now that the trees had shed their leaves, he could see the Sheetmire ferry, Derna prowling the platform, gathering her fares, six days a week, twelve hours a day. At this distance she was only a speck, a sexless mote driven perhaps by the same forces that drew the river on to its inevitable confluence with the Ohio. At times, he thought of driving down to the landing and crossing. But he never did. There were no more words to pass. He’d spoken enough of them already, in her living room, at the courthouse, in diners and at country gas stations when he happened to cross paths with her. He’d spoken too much, had gone beyond acceptable talk, even sputtering apologies to her one blustery October afternoon at the Micadoo post office. Derna, her bent fingers clutching a pile of envelopes, only lifted the blue lid of the mailbox, deposited her bills, and left. No cursing. No tears. No shake of the head. Only a brief glance, her eyes like the fire-hollowed burls of a tree that had been struck by lightning.

  Often, when he pulled away from the gray bluff that overlooked the river, Elvis
would drive to a small aluminum trailer yarded with pinwheels and birdbaths. Ella always let him in and they would drink coffee together in her kitchen while the television played in the living room.

  “When I get ready,” she told him one afternoon, “I’m going to leave this place. Save my money. Maybe move south. I got a brother lives in Springfield, Tennessee. I can stay with him and his wife. Find a job. Lord knows, there ain’t none here.”

  Her arms were thin. Her hands steady. She lifted the cup and sipped. Already, her belly was beginning to show, and the color in her cheeks had flushed.

  “I guess you’re set on keeping it,” Elvis said, nodding to the bulge above her waistline.

  Ella’s hand fell across her belly. “What kind of question is that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not too late. I could take you up to one of those clinics in Louisville.”

  Ella looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Who does something like that?”

  Elvis scooted the placemat away from him on the tabletop. “Things like that happen every day, Ella.”

  She shook her head. “I’m keeping it,” she said. “For once in my life I’m going to do what’s right. I don’t care what happens every day in this world. I’m not like this world. Not anymore.”

  Elvis sighed. He lifted his hat up and scooted the hair back on his scalp and then replaced the hat. “So you’re leaving town?”

  Ella nodded. “I’d tell you to do the same thing, Elvis,” she said. “Get out. This ain’t no kind of place. Everything is dried out and empty. The kind of people in it…Jesus.”

  “There’s bad all over,” he replied.

  “I’m aware. But the trouble around here, it gets to know you well enough where it thinks it can own you. I’m through with all that.” She tossed her hand through the air. “So I’d tell you to leave, but I know you won’t go.”

  “I got reelected, so I can’t go.”