The Marble Orchard (24 page)

Beam cranked the window down all the way and one of the dogs rushed forward, butting its head into the car so that he could smell the creature’s foul breath. The dog struggled to get in, raving wildly as globs of drool fell from its muzzle.

Beam brought the Walther up. “Right here,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger. The Doberman’s lower jaw tore away,
its warm blood dousing his legs. The dog fell from the car and crawled through the leaves, a wearied moan slithering up from its belly. The other dog trotted out of the shadows. It paused before the first hound, which coughed and then died. The surviving dog dipped its nose to sniff at the blood, then raised it eyes to stare at Beam in the car.

Beam rolled the window up again and slouched against the passenger door. His chest rocked with breath, and once it had steadied, he slowly unlaced his boots. He tied the long stout rope laces together, knotting them with a clove hitch, and then attached one end to the handle of the driver’s side door. He then cranked the passenger window down a few inches and ran the free end of the laces through the opening so that it draped down the outside of the door. Slowly, he opened the passenger side door. The hinges held it agape. Through the driver side window, he saw the Doberman cock its head. Beam moved to the driver side door, and when he opened it, the dog tensed, its forelegs stiffening.

Beam then scooted back toward the passenger door. The dog took a step forward. A long thread of drool dripped from its muzzle.

“I’m here,” Beam said, calmly.

When the Doberman bolted forward, Beam crawfished out the passenger side door and slammed it shut as the dog came bounding up into the Buick, moaning and wild, scraping its claws against the dingy window like a creature mad with hunger. Beam then yanked the laces so that the driver’s door closed, trapping the dog inside.

The animal went berserk. Foaming and apoplectic, roaring and growling, it leapt first at the front windshield and then tore over the backseat to push its muzzle and paws through the gashed roof. The car rocked and creaked on its rusted chassis.

For a time, Beam stood and watched. Eventually, the dog began to moan at him steadily, a rage drop-forged and flaming in its eyes.

Beam leaned against one of the car’s fenders, and saw the other dog, dead in the leaves with its head half gone. Beam’s lap was damp with the animal’s blood, which he brushed at absently. Then he threw the gun onto the ground and staggered away into the trees, the moonlight dropping over his shoulders like a shawl.

He was still walking when the moon left and the first rays of daylight began pricking through the clouds and trees. A cold dawn’s beginning as he journeyed toward someplace obscure, his mind quaking at all he had done, and the wonder of what he might yet do.

XIX

SATURDAY

He visited her at night. Alone on the frail porch, the trees casting pickets of moonlight across her feet, she doddered in the old unpainted rocker as he came up into the yard silent and vague as smoke. His boots whispered a hiss in the grass and his belt buckle glinted and then the dog appeared and she knew it was him and not some tatterdemalion dream come wandering out of her whiskeyed half-sleep.

“Hello to the porch,” he said. His voice sounded like tin warping in the heat.

“Come on up here, Loat,” she answered.

He stayed the dog in the yard and then ascended the steps, his smell of stale musk rising to her. She tipped the coffee mug of whisky back one more time, the dregs burning her throat, and then sat the mug beneath the rocker and looked up at him through the half-gloom, his shadow falling over her like the night robes of a deranged monk so that she was enveloped in the blackness he carried through the world.

“If you come to get a piece you’re too late. There ain’t none left to give.”

“I didn’t come for a fuck,” said Loat.

“Then you won’t be disappointed.”

Loat leaned against the porch’s veranda, the wood creaking under his weight. “I come to tell you about Clem,” he said.

Her eyes steadied on him. “I didn’t believe you’d come do that,” she said.

“Well, that’s the reason I’m here.”

She bobbed in the rocker, the runners cracking against the smooth porch boards. “Since you said that, you don’t have to say any more of it. I can figure the rest.”

A spell of quiet fell between them. Loat breathed huskily in the dark, while Derna swayed in the rotting chair as a dry wind smoothed the hair over her brow like an undertaker arranging the last grayed locks of a corpse.

“I guess it give you some pleasure, doing that to Clem,” she finally said.

“I didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t?”

“It was Daryl who had it done.”

Derna looked at Loat. His eyes were like a pair of glassy black stones lodged in his face. She could read nothing in them.

“I doubt you tried to stop it,” she said.

“If I’d been there I would have.”

“That sounds a lie.”

“It ain’t, though.”

“So, you come out here to tell me the way you wished it had turned out?”

Loat ran his hand over the rail of the veranda. “I wanted you to know, just in case you didn’t, that Clem was good to you. A sight better than I ever could’ve been.”

“It don’t take much to do better than you, Loat.”

“I can’t argue with that.” He turned and braced himself against the railing so that his back was to her and the moon came cowling over his shoulders to drop sleek and damp on the porch behind him. Out in the yard, the Doberman sat on its haunches. When Derna shifted in the chair, the animal snorted and groaned.

“You aim to have that dog eat me?” she asked.

“No, Derna. He’s done been fed today.”

“What about you? You been fed lately?”

He turned and looked at her, a crooked wicker grimalkin
with her eyes scorched and burning.

“I’ve not seen hide nor hair of Beam,” he said.

“Say you ain’t?”

“No. Have you heard from him?”

Derna shook her head slowly. “I looked. Couldn’t place a sign of him. Are you saying you want to give up on looking?”

“No. I only wanted to come by and give you some peace about Clem. That’s the main reason I’m here.”

Derna laughed, harsh and croupy. “I never had no peace from any man. Not Clem. Not you. Not my boys.” She steadied in the rocker. “You always were vain. It’s no surprise you think you could give me peace.”

“I don’t guess it were ever mine to give,” he answered. “I can’t say I ever knowed much peace my ownself.”

“Well, that’s the first thing I’ve heard you say tonight I’d put any stock in.”

Loat sat down on the top step of the porch. He whistled and the Doberman trotted over to him. He smoothed the dog’s ears back over its skull, the dog whining at his touch. Derna saw the absolute devotion the animal held for him, a thing she’d never known nor ever wished to give to anyone, not even herself. She didn’t know if the world had killed such a desire, or if she’d simply been born without it, but the more she thought about it, the less it seemed to matter. All she owned was her life now, a small pittance of years left to draw out beside a slow river. All she’d once wanted and hoped for—a man and children—was gone. There was nothing else.

“You still plan on finding Beam, then?” she asked.

“I do,” said Loat. He released the dog and its eyes flashed cold and bright.

“And why is that?”

“It’s what you asked me to do.”

“Maybe that’s why, but I don’t believe so,” she said. “I think maybe you’ve come to know how it is with you and Beam.”

Loat looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

Derna wadded her skirt between her fingers. Her lips fumbled together dryly, and then she swallowed. “You got to remember how I was already showing when I left you and Paul,” she said.

“Showing?”

Derna drew a hand across her belly. “In a family way.”

Loat snorted. “I’m hearing a tale too thick to stir,” he said.

“And you got to remember how I’d been sick a month before I took off. How I wouldn’t see hardly no callers out at Daryl’s? You remember that, I know.”

“Best I recall you never were too eager to keep company out at Daryl’s.”

“That’s true. I didn’t like that work none. Never did like laying down and earning my keep with what the Lord put between my legs, but you got to think how what I’m saying right now is the truth and how maybe we could both of us stand to do something right for once.”

“Hell, Derna. It could be any one of the studs that used to come to Daryl’s that put Beam in your belly.”

“You know that’s not so. In your heart, you know. I was your favorite girl back then. You’d hardly let any other man come near me.”

Loat turned away from her and looked out at the trees and the darkness. “I’m an old man now, Derna. Old and sick, and now you tell me the boy I’ve been hunting is mine. Don’t that shit the bed?”

“I’m old too, Loat,” Derna said. “I’m an old woman and I ain’t fifty yet. So I’d like to get buried with one of my own still walking the earth.”

Loat tongued the corner of his mouth. “Did Clem know about this?”

Derna shook her head. “He thought Beam belonged to some fly-by-night that stopped in at Daryl’s,” she said. “He never knew he was yours.”

“What about Beam? What’s he know?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Derna shook her head again. “He always believed Clem was his daddy.”

Loat wiped his mouth and grunted. “And now, after all these years, you tell me that Beam is mine. All on account of Paul winding up drowned. Ain’t this some shit?”

“Don’t it make a difference at all? You knowing Beam is yours?”

Loat reached down and patted the dog’s withers. “I can’t say for sure,” he said. “Helluva thing to lay on me here in my rickety years.”

Her eyes tightened. “Don’t say another word about me laying this on you, Loat,” she said. “I’ve been bearing it since I felt the first kick in my belly.”

Loat chuckled. “I expect that’s so.” He took his hand from the Doberman and wiped at his trousers, his expression squashed and cramped as if some great pain teethed at his soul. Which perhaps it did. “And you want me to keep going out and listening and looking and that’ll be some step toward doing a right thing? For once in my life?”

Derna picked at her dress collar. “I don’t know what else to do,” she said.

Arching his back, Loat groaned and then spat. “You know he killed Paul?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And you don’t think that colors it some? The way I see him? Paul was the only boy I ever knew to say was mine until right now.”

Derna spelled her rocking. She remained silent a long while. Then she rose from the chair and walked across the porch to Loat. The Doberman growled as she came near and Loat turned and stood to meet her and she put a hand on his arm, and felt
his blood flowing along under her fingers, moving through its old courses, its allotted places. Loat didn’t shy at her touch. She knew he wouldn’t. He was calm, sturdy. In his eyes, the fierceness brightened.

“If you’re saying you aim to do Beam wrong on account of Paul then I need to kill you right now,” she said.

Loat whistled softly. “That’s a job many a hard man ain’t been able to lay a hand to. What makes you think a dried out whore like you could do it?”

Derna slid a hand into her dress pocket and pulled out Clem’s .32 snubnose. She pushed the barrel into Loat’s belly. His breathing leveled.

“You make a fine old bitch of a widow,” he said.

Derna cocked the gun’s hammer back. “You find Beam and you don’t harm him. You bring him back here.”

He stared at her a moment, pouring his eyes into hers. “Hell, Derna,” he laughed. “I won’t hurt Beam. He’s mine. Him and Paul. I throwed both colts and I don’t hurt what’s mine.”

Derna eased the hammer down. She tucked the gun back into her dress and then floated back to her chair and sat down and began rocking again. “If any hurt comes to him and I hear you were the one to bring it I’ll hunt for you and I’ll kill you,” she said.

“You ain’t got to worry none,” he said. He descended the steps and walked out of the yard. The dog trotted after him, and they crossed through the moonlight and then the dark of the trees took them.

Derna stilled her rocking to listen. She thought she heard their footsteps, but the only noise was the wind teething on the walnut and locust boughs, a soft drizzling whisper. She was alone, as perhaps she’d always been. She took the gun from her dress and let it rest on her lap. The night was long, and she wanted to be ready for whatever it brought.

XX

SUNDAY

Daryl sat in a back room of the Quonset hut behind a long battered desk so old and brown it looked like an ancient Negro washwoman bowing prostrate before him. Two whores dressed in pastel negligees stood at his side filling small sandwich bags with prime leaf marijuana and then placing them in milk crates. A cigar burned in an ashtray on the desk. Occasionally, Daryl cleared his throat and one of the women lifted the cigar to his lips so he could puff on it with a low drowsy leisure.