The Marrowbone Marble Company (26 page)

“What's Paul Maynard say on it?” Dimple asked.

“He doesn't know about it. Nobody does.”

Dimple looked out over the hillside pasture. They'd cleared a good bit of land for it and the cornfield too. The wind picked up. “Cold front comin,” Dimple said. He shot back the last of his coffee. “Me and Wimpy'll pay Noah Ball a visit day after tomorrow.”

Ledford looked at the ground below his feet. “I appreciate it,” he said. He thought for a moment. “I believe we could keep this kind of thing between me, you, and Wimpy, and that'd be it,” he said.

Dimple watched the horses. The tips of their ears swiveled. He shook the loose fencepost again. “Should have dug these deeper,” he said.

 

T
HE
B
ALL
M
ORTUARY
was housed in an old, two-story Victorian on Salvation Street in Elmwood. The gables were trimmed in intricate circles, like a line of bull's-eyes. There were cornices across the top tower and the porch wrapped around the left side of the house. Its boards creaked under Dimple as he fingered the gingerbread trim along a windowsill. “I hate this kind of house,” he told Wimpy, who followed.

“I think it's pretty,” Wimpy said.

When they got to the side door, Dimple gave the knob a try. It was unlocked. When he opened it, the stained glass seemed to move in its lead cames, as if the whole panel might fall.

There was music inside the house. The further in they stepped, the louder it got. It was coming from below.

The Bonecutters took out their bandanas.

Down in the basement, Gene Autry was on the phonograph. Noah Ball loved Gene Autry songs, and if there was a duet, he always sang in time with the woman. “I've got spurs that jingle jangle jingle,” he crooned, slightly louder than the record player in the corner. He moved his feet on the checkbox linoleum floor, never picking up Gene Autry's intended rhythm. Noah was a vain man, as evidenced by his manicured mustache and nose-holes plucked clean of strays. He wore yellow rubber gloves and flicked his middle finger against an orange tube he'd inserted into the carotid artery of the dead woman before him on the table. She was old. Her skin was gray. He'd yet to trim her toenails, which had gone black and curled over the ends of her toes like snail shells.

He went on singing. “And that song ain't so very far from—”

The cold nose of the Smith & Wesson was at his neck. “Walk over and shut it off,” Dimple said.

Noah did as he was told, the revolver's barrel stuck to him all the way. He was careful not to scratch his record when he lifted the needle.

In an instant, the room was silent. Out of the corner of his eye, Noah made out a second man at the foot of the stairs, and in the silver reflection of the embalming tank to his left, he could see a dark figure behind him.

“Cover her up,” Dimple said. He hated to see a dead woman like that, her parts out in the open.

Noah threw a sheet over the body. He'd yet to utter a word. He thought momentarily of the secret room he kept behind the bookcase.

Dimple took the gun from his neck and stepped back. He cocked his right leg as far as he could and swung it forward hard, his shinbone connecting dead center between the man's legs. Noah emitted a sound like that of a vacuum turning on and dropped to the floor.

The brothers wore the black toboggans Rachel had knit them three Christmases back. It was the first time they'd ever put them on. They wore their bandanas clear up to the eyes. Paisley red, and old. Each had on a common barn coat and blue jeans. Their oldest, most nondescript boots.

Noah stared up at them from the floor, where he clutched at the rising bruise in his stomach and tried not to retch. He thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. These two were out of a movie.

“See here, Noah Ball,” Dimple said. “And I mean listen. Or next time, I'll take those crushed nuts of yours with me like a souvenir, and I'll rip your dick out, too, you hear me?”

Noah just breathed heavy. “Hear me?” Dimple roared.

Wimpy pulled a seven-inch dagger blade from his belt. He raised it up and swung it down, ironwood handle heavy as its name. The knife tip stuck in the linoleum with a dull thud.

“Yes, yes, I hear you,” Noah managed. He pissed himself a little, wondered if there was blood in it.

Dimple crouched to him. His revolvered hand went lazy. “You ever lay a finger on another Marrowbone woman,” he said, pointing with his gun, “that knife'll be up to the hilt in your danglers.”

Noah shuddered. He made a quiet, whimpering sound, then managed to stay relatively still.

Dimple stood up. They'd started to walk up the stairs when he turned back. “You tell your cousin Charlie or Shorty Maynard about this, you'll be might sorry,” he said. “Do you think I mean what I say?” he asked. It had gotten sweaty under the bandana. He could smell his own foul breath.

“Yessir,” Noah said. He was prone, his chin tucked.

From the stairs, they could only see the ugly crown of his balding head. “Me and him both got no problem stabbin' a man like you,” Dim
ple said. “Gets easier ever time we do it.” He glared over the bandana's rim, stepped down from the stair, and walked to the record player. He lifted the arm and set the needle down. The whistles waddled happy. “Try not to sing the ladies' part this time,” Dimple said. “You ain't got the pipes for it.” He ascended the stairs behind his brother.

Gene Autry sang, “Yippy yay, there'll be no wedding bells today.”

C
HARLES
T
OWN
R
ACE
T
RACK
was a half-miler in the state's eastern panhandle. Erm had first bet its windows in 1948—a side trip from some business in Baltimore. “Bush league,” Chicago bookies said of the West Virginia track. The purse on a day's races wasn't half that of a track like Hawthorne. But by 1966, Erm owned and stabled three horses at Charles Town, and he had everyone on the take.

He had two Airstream trailers out back of the stables. One was for Fury. The other was for Erm and his girl of the month.

At five a.m., Fury shoved a doughnut in Willy's mouth and flicked him in the forehead. The trailer smelled of beer. “Let's go,” Fury said. “We're going to miss the morning workout.”

The sun rose over the steel plant smokestacks, casting shadows across the track's turned dirt. Exercise boys in dusty T-shirts mounted horses on the afternoon card, and a man with a cigarette behind each ear called out the day's scratches. “Ain't no rain comin,” he said. “Stay on your mount or that dirt'll snap your neck.” He pulled the cigarette from his right ear and lit it with the one in his lips.

Erm leaned on the rail by the finish pole. He studied his short form and talked to a fat man in a bowler hat. “Him,” Erm said, pointing to a young jockey working out Tuna Melt, one of his three horses.

“Smart,” the fat man said. “Save two bills makin him git up this early.”

“Damn right,” Erm said. The exercise boys commanded a two-dollar rate for morning work, but a prospective jockey got nothing.

Erm watched the kid around the quarter turn. His stirrups were too low.

Willy squinted at the sun. He'd never been to the eastern panhandle, and its relative flatness didn't agree with him.

“Here,” Fury said. He handed Willy a paper cup of steaming coffee.

“Thanks.”

“You see the kid on the brown filly? That's the new jock.” Fury pointed to the same rider his father was watching.

“Did you ever want to be a jockey?” Willy scorched his tongue on the coffee.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I'm five foot ten.” Fury snorted morning snot and spat it on the ground.

“Oh. Yeah,” Willy said. He gripped the track's rail in his hand, knocked his cast against it. Across his forearm, in black paint on plaster, were the words
ORB WAS HERE
. Willy had punched a wall at the gym and broken two bones in his hand and wrist. The doctor had shaken his head at the X rays. “You've fractured both a carpal and metacarpal,” he'd said, pointing with his pencil to something Willy couldn't see.

His temper had gotten the better of him again. He'd been on edge, in the first place—Josephine was keeping him a secret from her family. Something had happened to Mary that no one would speak to. Then, Hambone Maynard had sold Orb a cup of lemonade for a nickel. After watching him drink it down, Hambone told Orb that he'd pissed in it. Orb ran off to sit with his dogs. Chester found him there, reported the event to Willy at the gym. “The hefty boy called Orb a bad name,” Chester had said. “He called Orb a dough-baked half-wit.” That's when Willy punched the wall. He'd lain in bed for three days after the cast. He'd taken up smoking again.

He'd be a freshman at Marshall in August. Fury wasn't going to college. He'd enlisted in the Marine Corps. Vietnam awaited, and this was Fury's last hurrah.

By the day's third race, the sun cut through the grandstand opening. Fury and Willy sat on benches and ate hot dogs with onion and mustard. “Watch this,” Fury said. He pulled a gold-handled magnifying glass from the big paper sack at his feet. It was difficult to find the right angle, but eventually Fury found it. The sun's rays came through the glass in a pinpoint of blue-white light.

Willy watched the target just below them, a man wearing overalls in the infield.

“Watch his neck,” Fury said. A circle the size of a ladybug danced on the tanned neck of the overalled man. Fury got it still. The man twitched and twisted free. His arm shot back and slapped his burnt skin.

This delighted Willy. He laughed RC Cola right out his nose-holes. Fury shushed him and hid the magnifying glass. The man had turned around and was searching wildly for the yellowjacket that stung him. Fury said, “Stupid railbird hillbilly. Half wit'll spend his last dollar on a longshot cause he likes its name.” He knocked back the end of a beer.

Willy quit laughing.

Inside the riders' room, four tiny men sat at a card table playing five-card draw. All smoked. All wore undershirts and jockstraps. Four Styrofoam cups bled rings on the cheap laminate top, screwdrivers all around. They anted and called and the youngest laid out his cards. “Four eights, King high,” he said.

There was a groan, then the sliding of quarters into a pile.

Three other jockeys were in the room, pulling on socks in front of their lockers. Two were overweight and one was bald. They'd not been invited to play.

Erm came through the door. “Take a walk,” he said to the men at the lockers.

“But we got to get in our silks,” the bald one answered.

Erm stuck his face in the bald man's direction. “I said take a fuckin walk.”

They did so.

Erm pulled a chair to the card table and produced four envelopes from his inside pocket. “Just do what we talked about,” he said.

Back by the grandstand, a ticket stooper looked up women's skirts. “Look at this bum,” Fury said, pointing to the man. “Anything for a beaver shot I guess.”

When the announcer called “Twenty minutes to post,” Fury reached into his brown bag and produced a fat roll of bills.

“Why don't you just keep that in your pocket?” Willy asked.

Fury didn't answer. He was peeling off fifties. He licked his thumb just as he'd seen his father do a thousand times. He handed six fifty-dollar bills to Willy and put six of his own in his shirt pocket. “Remember,” he said, “all you have to say is one sentence—‘Twenty-five on Tuna Melt to win, fifteen on First Edition to place, ten on Heav'nly King to show.' Say it back to me.”

Willy repeated it word for word. He'd have to say it six more times in the next twenty minutes.

When they got to the betting bay, lines were longer than Fury had anticipated. “Fucking payday,” he said under his breath. They'd have to work fast. “Look,” he said to Willy. “Stagger your lines. Got it? Go to that one first, then skip down two lines to that one, skip two more, and so on.” He pointed as he explained. “Keep your ballcap on at the first, take it off at the second, and keep rotating that way.”

“Got it,” Willy said.

“Most of these ticket sifters are in the know,” Fury said. “But you can't be too careful.”

Fury slid into the bathroom. Inside a stall, he pulled an overcoat, fedora, and sunglasses from his brown bag. He put them on and headed for the betting windows.

In all, they placed the same bet to twelve different countermen. Fury changed in the bathroom again, and they walked back to their seats with eighteen tickets apiece.

When the gate opened, two of the paid-off jockeys yanked hard on their reins. They kept their elbows tucked so as not to be obvious. Their horses would never recover from such a start. The kid on Tuna Melt got a great break from the three position. After the morning workout, he'd adjusted his stirrups, and now he was riding hard all the way.

On the three-quarter turn, the last of the bribed jockeys wheeled wide and dropped from second to fourth. He bumped the bald jockey on his way, pushing him from contention. That left three. Tuna Melt was the superior equine. The only question was who would place and who would show.

“C'mon, you fucking midgets,” Fury said. He held binoculars to his eyes.

The two jockeys Fury watched were middle-aged farmhands. Their horses were broken-down fillies at glue factory's gate. Odds were 20 and 30 to 1. But none of that mattered if First Edition didn't pass Heav'nly King in the next two seconds.

Tuna Melt led gate to wire and won by six lengths. At 9 to 1, she'd pay out nicely. Place and show were too close to call. They were going to a photo finish.

Willy watched Fury slam his binoculars into the bag. It sounded as if the glass cracked. “Please please please,” Fury was saying, his head bowed, his fingers laced in prayer.

When the results went official, Fury leapt from his seat, punched the air and hollered “Thank you Jesus!” First Edition had placed by the tip of her flaring nostril. Fury sat down and gathered himself. Went silent for a moment. “This is a big one,” he told Willy.

They went back to the windows and collected using the same stagger and disguise method they'd employed to bet.

In all, with the boys' winnings and what he cleared through his local bookie, Erm left Charles Town that Friday with almost ten grand.

“Not bad for a day's work,” he told the boys as they pulled onto Middleway Pike. At the last stoplight in town, Erm peeled off two hundred for each of them and passed the bills to the backseat. They were already loose on beer he'd bought them at the ABC store. “Here,” he said when he handed Willy the cash. “Maybe you'll get your prick wet.”

By midnight, both boys were passed out drunk. Erm took his time driving through Charleston. Kanawha Boulevard was quiet. He could smell the river.

He parked the Cadillac in an empty Shoney's parking lot. The headlights of a passing car reflected off the restaurant window. The blacktop was rain-slicked.

Erm looked at the two boys in the rearview. Willy snored.

He checked his watch. Charlie Ball was late.

The white Impala rolled up at a quarter to one. Charlie stopped with a jerk in the space next to Erm and waved a hand. There was a woman in the backseat.

Erm got out of his own car and into the Impala. A fifth of whiskey sat upright on the seat, and the upholstery stank of sweat. Charlie Ball was dead drunk. The woman in the backseat was not his wife. This one was blond, young. She was asleep, her bra straps loose around her biceps, her mouth open.

“You play it pretty loose for public servant, don't you, Charlie?” Erm said.

Charlie smiled and unscrewed the top of his whiskey. He knocked back a big one. “Erm, I want you to meet Ginger,” he said. He whistled. Ginger didn't stir, so he whistled again, louder. She opened her eyes.

Erm looked at the young woman, spoke his customary line. “How do you do?”

She said, “How do we do? We do it dog style so we can both see the television.”

The two men laughed hard. Charlie could scarcely stop. “Hot damn, she's got a mouth, doesn't she?” he said.

She licked her dry lips, looked at Erm, and said, “That's how we do.” She picked up her pocketbook and rooted for cigarettes.

Erm watched her fall back asleep before she could get her cigarette lit. It rested between her fingers, twitched a little. He turned and looked out the front windshield. A giant statue of a boy was atop the restaurant. He hoisted a hamburger.
Fat Boy
was written across his shirt. Erm wanted to point out his likeness to Charlie. “I've got your money,” he said.

Charlie nodded. “You're a smart Italian man.”

Erm pulled the old leather envelope from his inside pocket and unzipped it. Handed over twenty grand in hundreds, rubber-banded.

Charlie thumbed the edges. He winked at Erm, put the money in his own inside pocket. “This is good land,” he said. “Good for horse racing.”

Erm didn't care that Charlie knew nothing of tracks and dirt pack and leveling terrain. He was a politician, and like the rest of them, he would push gambling on the hayseeds because he knew there was money in it. Come payday, they'd line up at the betting windows.

Erm stuck his hand out for the shake. Charlie took it. The grip made him cringe, and when he looked Erm in the eyes, he knew he'd made a mistake.

“Okay, so,” Charlie said. He looked away and cleared his throat.

“Shorty Maynard's got the original deed. That acreage is more than we thought, and I don't believe Shorty'll have any trouble getting his name on all of it. The developers are in line to—”

“You told me that none of this land cuts into Ledford's property.” Erm took his hand off the door latch.

Charlie tried to sharpen up. “Oh no, of course not,” he said. He smiled, looked back at Ginger.

Erm opened the door and stepped out. “Sit tight a minute,” he said. Charlie took deep breaths and watched Erm open the big Cadillac door. He leaned across the seat for something on the floor. Charlie saw two figures asleep in the back, but he couldn't tell who they were. He began to panic.

Erm returned and stood at the Impala's open passenger window with his hand in his jacket. He stuck his face in and gave Charlie the eye. He pulled a box of cigars out fast. Charlie flinched. “Be a good boy, Charlie,” Erm said.

Before he drove away, he called, “Get a neck strap and hand those out at the legislature.”