The Marble Orchard (7 page)

Loat and Presto looked at one another. One of the Dobermans began to growl steadily, until Loat told it to hush and it went quiet.

“It’s something he’s got to have,” said Presto, his voice scratching like rusty gears.

“Sounds like y’all got a bit of looking to do,” said Clem.

Everyone remained quiet for a spell. Somewhere in the trees along the river a screech owl called and the wind stirred the pampas grass edging the lawn and then went still. Clem knew the men standing in his yard well, had even run with Loat for a time in his youth. Memories of the wild drunks he’d gone on, of poker games with fifty dollar antes where sometimes the pot contained not only cash but the affections of a particular whore at Daryl Van Landingham’s dance hall rummaged through his mind, and
he nearly smiled until he recalled the man Loat had become. He reached out and gripped the pistol on the porch railing.

“Ferry’s down,” Presto said, breaking the silence. “How come?”

“She run aground the other night,” Clem explained. “Got her hoisted on the shore for repairs.”

“Run aground? Was you drunk?”

“Course I was. Drunk as Cooter Brown in his underwear.”

Loat licked his dentures, then spit into the grass. “You don’t usually run it of a night. That’s mostly Beam’s job.”

“Beam’s been sick here, lately,” Clem said. “I’ve been taking his shift, letting Derna run it of the morning.”

“Say Beam’s been feeling poorly?”

“Yes, he has.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

Clem cleared his throat, but didn’t spit. “I don’t know why I’m standing out here at such an hour letting you question me this way, Loat,” he said.

“You’re listening because there ain’t another thing you can do. Whatever’s wrong with Beam, I’ll find it out one way or the other. Same as I’ll find out who done Paul in. Anything you know, you best go ahead and say it now because you know how I hate to find a man hasn’t been playing square with me.” Loat reached a boot out and scratched one of the Dobermans under the chin with it, soliciting a low grumble from the dog.

“Beam’s not here,” Clem said quickly.

Loat smiled. “Thought you said he was feeling poorly.”

“He was, but he’s better now.”

“So where’s he gone off to?”

Clem’s guts rumbled and he grimaced. For years, his ulcers had forced him to keep a box of Arm ‘N Hammer baking soda and a spoon close by, the chalky powder being the only antidote for his pained innards, and he longed for it now. “He’s off tomcatting, I guess. You know how they are at that age,” he said, the sting in
his stomach shortening his breath.

“I reckon you never told Beam he had a half-brother?” Loat asked.

The trees beyond the yard trembled in the breeze, shivering like naked dry bones, and the wind crept down from the branches and slithered through the grassy yard and up the porch steps to swirl about Clem, drying the sweat from his cheeks.

“That’s what we decided, me and Derna,” he said. “We’d had our druthers, Paul never would’ve been told Derna was his mama, either. But you fixed that, didn’t you.”

“He remembered her.”

“That don’t seem possible.”

“He was four when she left,” said Loat. “That’s old enough for a boy to remember someone and Paul damn sure remembered Derna. He started asking questions once they hauled him off to Eddyville and I decided to tell him. It’s no surprise he wanted to know. Man’s mother has a special pull on him. Even if she is an old worn-out whore.”

Clem lifted the pistol and held it at his side, keeping the muzzle down. “You can’t talk like that. Not in this yard,” he said.

Loat took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. The smoke bunched beneath his hat and then clouded and dissolved in the cool night air. “Thought I might ought to mention I told Paul about Beam as well,” he said. “Man’s brother has a special pull on him, too. Why I figured he might come this way if he ever got out.”

“I already told you I don’t know anything about Paul and neither does Beam.”

Loat drew on his cigarette. “That’s what you’re telling me now.” He nodded slowly. “I hope the story don’t change any.”

“The way I tell it ain’t going to change.”

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about. The farther a man has gone from the truth the harder it is for him to get back to it, but you say you never left it and so there’s nothing to
trouble your mind.” Loat shrugged. “People don’t like the truth very much, though. They want it to be a way that would suit them, but the truth can only be one way.”

“What way would that be?”

“The way it is.” Loat dropped the cigarette into the grass and slid his boot over it. “The way it’s always been and is always going to be.” He turned and walked back to the Cadillac and opened the passenger side door. He then whistled and the Dobermans scrambled into the backseat, their claws scratching on the vinyl. Presto sat down behind the steering wheel and cranked the engine and sat waiting while Loat stood beside the open door, the moonlight falling damp and slick over his body.

“I’ll be going now,” he said. “I know you have a lot of prayers to say before the sun comes up.” Loat got in the car and pulled the door shut. Presto clicked the headlights on and then turned the car around in the yard and they drove off on the road leading away from the river.

For a long time, Clem stood on the porch listening to the Cadillac’s tires bicker over the gravel until the sound receded and no noise was left in the night but the crickets and the wind preening at the trees.

When he came back inside, Derna was sitting on the couch. She kept the shotgun propped between her thighs, clutching the barrel with both hands as if it were a broom.

“Where is Beam?” she asked.

Clem stuck the pistol in the waist of his jeans. “Gone is all I can say. I don’t know where to.”

Derna shook her head absently. Her gaze lay on the front window, its curtains silvered to a frosty glow from the moonlight. “I can’t see why it would be both of them to go at the same time,” she said. “Both my boys.”

“Beam’s out getting drunk and he’ll be back by good daylight,” said Clem. “You don’t need to worry over him.”

Derna kept her eyes on the window. She pulled her hair over
her shoulder and began running her fingers through it. “Get my vacuum, Clem. I feel like doing a little cleaning right now.”

It was what she was prone to do during hard times. She would mix buckets of suds to mop with, or run a dust cloth over all the furniture if certain dreams chased her from sleep, no matter the hour. It was her way to draw the filth out of the corners of the house whenever life tilted toward disaster, as if polished floors and ironed sheets could bring a timid peace to a place where death or ruin had touched its hand.

Clem was suddenly struck by the memory of Derna back when she’d lived with Loat. He’d dressed her in sleek fitting summer dresses of bright pastel and gave her the duties of cleaning house. Called her “Dollbaby.”

“I like to watch Dollbaby push that broom,” he’d say, grinning as Derna bowed to guide a few dust kittens into a scoop. Then he’d let his eyes drift shut and nod his head back. “Sometimes, I just close my eyes and listen to her moving in her dress. Sounds slow and easy enough to put me straight to sleep.”

When only one or two men were visiting Loat, Derna seemed a bit laggard in her duties, slow to empty the slop jar or to feed dinner scraps to the dogs. But when the house bucked and shook with a wild humid fury, the air charged with the electric hum of men bent in grudge and anger toward one another, Derna came alive. Clem remembered coming over for games of seven card and watching Derna creep into the room full of men where the smoke vined up the newspapered walls and the chips clinked on the baize table, her look cautious but simpering, as if she’d undertaken a great dare by entering the midst of these drunken gamblers. She tended to linger about, her rouged lips cut into a thin smile while she bussed drinks or swept cigarette butts from the tongue-and-groove floor.

Other than to sneak quick glances or give flirty winks, most of the card players ignored her. This changed one night when a liquored tobacco planter named Boyce Hazelip took umbrage
toward Derna’s loitering in the smoky shadows.

“Loat, that woman a yours makes me nervous,” he said, running a yellow fingernail over his chips, his gray beard dripping from his chin like mossy slime. He was an older man, and often deferred to or at least humored because of his seniority, but as the night wore on he tipped his cup more and more and his eyes often went darty and mean toward Derna, especially as his losses began to tally up.

“I say, Loat, do you not have a keep to put that woman in?” he asked. “She’s staring at me like a cat.”

It was long summer, and the jar flies bumped and whirred against the window screens. Derna stood with her back to the dead woodstove just behind Loat, feeling the cold iron against her rump through her sheer cotton dress. Yes, she had been staring at Hazelip, but only because she found his bald, peeling head a wonder, so warty and livered with moles it appeared like a globe of some reddened world with all its scars and rifted valleys.

“I can see how having a woman look your way would make you nervous, Boyce,” said Loat. “It likely don’t happen too often to an ugly sonuvabitch like you.”

Hazelip chewed his bottom lip and glared at Loat, who didn’t look up from his cards. “What if I was to say I think she’s been tipping hands to you all night?” he said.

The rest of the gamblers, Clem included, hushed their idle chatter. Loat raised his eyes to the old man and laid his cards face down on the table. He folded his hands calmly over one another. “You’re not happy with the way things are going?” he asked.

Hazelip bobbed his chin toward the towers of chips that sat in front of Loat like a city in miniature. “You take all the honey and don’t leave none for me,” he said.

Loat straightened in his chair. He addressed the table at large, but did not look away from Hazelip. “Any of you other boys think Dollbaby’s been tipping hands to me?”

Including Clem, there were six men at the table, and they all
looked at their cards or up at the uncovered bulb burning on its wire in the ceiling and said nothing. In later years, Clem wondered what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been the one to speak, if things would have been different if he’d been able to hold to his quiet, to let someone else answer Loat’s question. But after nearly a minute of silence, he broke and declared that the thought of Derna tipping hands had never entered his mind. Everyone at the table but Hazelip seconded this, some with grudging whispers, others with eager nods.

“Looks to be nobody but you thinks the game’s rigged, Boyce.” Loat unfolded his hands and placed them at either side of his stack of chips. “Maybe you better take back what you said.”

Hazelip’s eyes goggled about the table, searching the gaze of his fellow gamblers, but none would meet his looks. In the thatch of his beard, the old man’s lips began a slight tremor and his damp yellow whiskers twitched as if something were trying to burrow into his face, and then he settled his stare on Derna who stood still and gape-eyed against the stove.

“I can’t take it back,” Hazelip muttered. His eyes clocked upward to the lone light dangling from a ceiling joist and then drifted down again to look at Loat. His hand was creeping slowly toward the pocket of his Dungarees where everyone knew he carried a .25 caliber pistol, but Loat remained steady in his chair as his breath whistled over the flange of his tiny nostrils.

“If you can’t take it back, then I guess you’d better leave,” he said.

Hazelip’s hand suddenly stopped and lay like a flattened crab on the tabletop. His mouth opened a bit, the small worn kernels of his teeth just visible behind his cracked lips. Slowly, he scooted his chair back and stood. A sheen of sweat glossed his brow. He patted his beard down against his chest and grunted. “You know as well as me that woman’s been tipping cards to you.”

Loat looked at his hands. He drew a Case knife from his trousers and began paring the blue earth from under his
fingernails with the blade and then wiping it clean on the edge of the baize. “If that’s the story you want to tell there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said.

“It’s not a story,” replied Hazelip. “It’s the truth.”

Loat closed the knife and laid it on the table. He watched it for a moment as if he expected it to spring off the table at his command. “I think you are an old man who has had too much to drink and whose mind isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “But if you keep talking, these facts won’t help you.”

He then raised his eyes to Hazelip, and the two locked their stares. What Clem remembered most, however, was the look of expectant joy that rode Derna’s face, her eyes bright and hungry as a girl in the throes of her first ravishing. She fumbled with the collar of her dress, revealing the milky flesh of her cleavage, and her lips were soon flushed. Though he was no greenhorn, Clem had never seen a woman actually swoon, but this seemed to be what he witnessed, as Derna’s eyes fluttered and a slow groan of ecstasy rolled up from her belly. Her knees buckled and she braced herself against the stove, her head bent so that her black curls dangled in the drafty air, and she gripped the edge of the iron stove with such force her knuckles whitened.

All of the men turned toward her. Even Loat, his mouth now gaped in slack surprise, craned his neck.