The Marble Orchard (22 page)

“Storage, huh?”

Daryl’s chalky dry lips broke into a smile. “Business is so good, I’m running out of room.”

Elvis propped his elbows on the bar and folded his hands before him, stroking his chin with his thumbs. He tried to see an angle, some profit Daryl might be gleaning from the entire mess, but there seemed little sense to it. He wondered what help he was giving anyone by being in such a place as this.

“You and Loat used to pal around with Clem,” he said.

Daryl’s head bobbed. “We did at one time. Then Clem started to turn a little churchy. I don’t think he ever got real holy, but I know he quit drinking for awhile. Then he wound up with Derna and we never saw him hardly much at all after that.”

“What happened with you and him and Loat out at those mines?”

Daryl’s eyes went thin. “You know that story already,” he said coldly.

“Way I heard it, there’s bad blood between you and Clem on account of it. So you tell me why that is.”

Daryl squirmed on his stool. He leaned forward, his breath rattling in his nostrils. “There ain’t no bad blood,” he said. “Not no more.”

“Why is that?”

“You get old enough, time squares most of your debts.”

“That don’t sound like you at all.”

“I don’t believe you know me well enough to say what is and what ain’t like me. Clem wasn’t never going to make amends. He’s yellow as soap and twice as soft. So I decided I had bigger things to worry over.”

Elvis put his hands on the bar again. “What’d he do out there at the mines?” he asked.

Daryl snorted. “Oh, he just saw to it that it was me got the short end of the stick out there. Let’s leave it at that.”

Elvis wiped absently at the bar top. “Is there bad blood between Loat and Clem?”

Daryl leaned hard against the bar. “If you mean on account of Derna, I’d say there’s some. But I can guarantee you it ain’t something Loat worries over too much. He’s done had that pussy. And there ain’t a dollar to be made with it now no how, so you know he ain’t walking the floor over Derna. Whether or not it chaps Clem’s ass that Loat used to fuck his wife, I can’t say.”

Elvis stroked the bar. The wood felt frayed and burned. “Loat ever talk about Paul?”

“Not much. He’d say something every now and then, wondering what Paul was gonna do once he got out.” His head bobbed and he smiled wetly. “But, the river’s done took care of that.”

“Somebody and the river.”

Daryl’s smile faded. Then, quickly, the grin returned and he took to chuckling. “What’s all this about, Elvis? You come in here all swagger and swinging dick asking about Beam Sheetmire like he’s been lost in the high weeds.”

Elvis watched the dancers in the mirror, their bodies dragging through the smoke. The laughter in the room thickened. “Had a feller come visit me at the courthouse the other day,” he said. “He was dressed like he’d been to a wedding. In a suit, I mean.” Elvis cocked his head, watching Daryl. “The feller told me Beam had been up here. Said he got beat pretty bad. Said he was the one to beat him.”

Daryl licked the flesh beneath his nose. “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “Who was this feller?”

Elvis shrugged. “Just a feller,” he said. “Anyhow, you ain’t seen Beam Sheetmire up here in your bar? That what you’re telling
me? That it’s just been the regular crowd of drunks?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“And I guess you ain’t seen nobody wearing a suit neither?”

“I believe I’d remember that.”

“I’d think you would too, but I suspect,” Elvis said, rising off his stool, “that you’ve told me nothing but lies today.”

“Helluva thing to say to a businessman,” Daryl said.

Elvis straightened his gun belt and hammered Daryl with his stare. “I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you I think you’re an outright sonuvabitch,” he said. “But that ain’t the worst part.” Elvis stepped back from the bar. “The worst part is trying to picture how a sonuvabitch like you wipes his ass and takes a piss. By the way you smell, I guess you don’t have much luck doing either.”

Daryl laughed. “Come on back to the trough then, Elvis. You can shake my dick dry for me.”

“I’ll get a warrant,” Elvis said. “This place will be closed in a day. I know these girls you got out here ain’t just waitresses and bar maids.”

Daryl chuckled again. “Go on. See if you can get a judge to grant you that warrant. I’d love to hear the story about how Old Black Robes laughed you out of the courtroom and then took your badge. What happened to the last sheriff wanted to serve a warrant on me. You remember that, I know. Best recall how I got too much dirt on folks around here to ever get shut down.”

Elvis patted the bar lightly, then turned and looked at the room. In the middle of the dance floor was a large black stain. He strode over and squatted beside it, the dancers giving him the strange eye as they shuffled around him. He bent down and touched the stain, the wood smooth and glossed. “You don’t keep your floors too clean out here do you, Daryl?” he yelled.

“Hard to mop up everything that gets spilled,” Daryl answered. “There’s usually always some leavings left over.”

Elvis stood up and slid his shoe over the stain. He looked
over at Daryl on his perch before the bar, seated like some derelict king in a counting house whose currency was blood, a man who bartered only with death itself.

He spat on the floor and left.

XVII

SATURDAY

They heard the flash over the scanner bolted to the dash of the trucker’s rig. Two bodies had been found at Pete Daughtery’s house over on Belltown Road. The radio snored out the details: three dogs shot as well, all parties as yet unidentified. One deputy and Sheriff Dunne were on scene. Coroner and paramedics en route.

Loat and the trucker were soon en route themselves.

Coasting the back roads, Loat rode shotgun in the trucker’s Peterbilt, dotting the fields and woods with his stares. Two days ago, he’d left Presto at Pete Daughtery’s place with instructions to wait in the briars. Now he’d heard the news over the scanner. In his lap, he kept a Smith and Wesson .40-cal, stroking the grip-embossed handle and listening to the rig’s steel-belt tires yawn over the bald pavement.

His plan remained cloudy. In fact, he had no plan at all and didn’t know how he hoped to explain to the sheriff his sudden arrival at Pete Daugherty’s place. He’d always gone where he pleased, but now he thought that perhaps larger forces had conscripted him and his course long ago, perhaps before his birth. This idea struck him as stupendous and awful, and he quickly threw his mind away from it.

His hound Enoch slept in the floorboards at his feet, its hide twitching as it dreamed through the squawk and bleat of the police scanner. It surprised Loat that the dog could sleep through such. The dreams of dogs must be sturdy. Were he a better man, he would build sturdy dreams for himself. Instead, he was riding
over empty roads with this strange trucker and he was dying and there was neither time nor space with which to dream.

“Pretty country,” said the trucker as they drove past fields devoid of timber. This land had been strip-mined and later reclaimed with dozers and track hoes that pushed the ruptured earth together again, but the soil had been cursed by its trespassers and was now only Judas dirt where sedge and wire grass spiraled up amidst sapling cedars sown to beat the wind back. It looked like a strange occurrence of prairie where no prairie should be. Certain spots still remained scarred with open strip-pits, and the surface coal flashed bluely in the sun, the ground itself ashy and coated with shale rock so that it appeared gray and shattered like the very geography of dereliction.

“You think so?” Loat asked. He leaned forward and turned the scanner’s volume down.

“Looks about like a dirty old wash pan that’s been beat to pieces and then glued back together,” the trucker answered.

“Well, about all the good it’s doing is holding the world in place. Won’t nothing grow on it. I’d say it wouldn’t even be worth grazing cattle on.”

“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.”