The Marble Orchard (21 page)

“No. But likely there’s a least one somebody in that house who’s not in walking condition.” Elvis slid his gun out of its
holster, checked the loads, and fixed the weapon back on his hip. “Take the shotgun and go around back,” he said. “After you’ve radioed for an ambulance.”

Once the paramedics had been called, the two peace officers got out of the cruiser. Filback shucked shells into the breech of his Benelli, but Elvis kept his pistol holstered as he moved slowly through the yard under the hanging pawpaw and maple branches. When he came up onto the porch, he paused, listening as Filback moved around back through the joe-pye and jimson weeds.

The front door drifted closed, and then open. There was no clean way to do this. That much he’d learned. Whatever lay inside a house, it was just going to have to be dealt with. There was no way to stop any of it now. This was going to happen. Just as it always had. No matter how long you took to put your hat on, eventually you had to go through a door and meet whatever waited on the other side for you.

Elvis squinted through the cracked door at the innards of the house. Sunlight glared off the blank television screen. A pile of beer cans were scattered about the carpet. A front window had been shattered.

“Pete,” he called. Then again, louder, “Pete, this is Elvis. You all right?” No one answered. A cold draft leeched from the house and licked his hands. Around back, Filback tromped through the high weeds, peering into windows and making nothing but noise and trouble.

Elvis drew his revolver and went inside. Another Doberman lay dead on the carpet against the far wall, its tongue lolled out swollen and pale from between its jaws. Pete was slouched against a close wall, his eyes dead and open, his hands sprawled empty and bloody in his lap. He had the look of someone who’d recently been swindled. Beside him, Presto Geary lay swathed in blood, and Elvis noted a small entry wound in his chest and a fist-sized exit wound in his back.

Slowly, Elvis made his way through the house, down the dim
hall with its warped paneling, through the kitchen stinking of unwashed dishes and fried bologna and beans, to the back rooms, which held only a bed and ricks of junk—sewing machines and come-alongs and all the old man’s tinkerings.

When he returned to the front room, Filback was standing in the doorway, the shotgun hanging loose at his side.

“Put the safety on, Filback,” Elvis told him.

The deputy jerked at the sound of Elvis’s voice. He looked at the gun he held and then clicked it dead.

“Nobody home,” said Elvis. He holstered his pistol and sat down on the sofa, looking at the two dead men on the floor. Flies crawled through their hair and eyelashes and into the open maw of Pete’s throat, their buzzing loud and awful in the hot closeness of the house.

“This party didn’t turn out too well, did it?” said Filback.

Elvis looked up at Filback, who wore a limp grin. A single snaggly tooth hung over his bottom lip so he looked like a gawker come to the carnival to witness strange evil and give crude commentary.

“Sit down, Filback. Mind you don’t step in the blood.”

The deputy looked about the room and then made for the chair sitting beside the television. It creaked with his weight. He stowed the shotgun between his legs and the damp hair hanging from under his hat made him resemble a widow waiting in a bus terminal, as if he were a bereft woman bound somewhere. “I wouldn’t have thought Pete to go out this way,” he said.

Elvis leaned forward and scanned the bloody carpet covered with shell casings, the pile of beer cans beside Filback’s feet, and the rifle on the floor. He reached down and picked up one of the empty brass shells, pinching it between his fingers. “Believe this is a pistol round here,” he said. He jiggled the casing in his hand and nodded toward Presto’s body. “But he wasn’t shot with any pistol round. That rifle did the job.” He pointed to the long-barrel Winchester 30-06 on the floor, then nodded toward
the Doberman. “That’s one of Loat’s dogs,” he said. “And that’s Presto Geary lying there, though his ride ain’t nowhere around.”

Filback tweezed his nostrils with a pair of pinched fingers. “Maybe he walked here,” he said.

Elvis squinted at him. “Listen, Filback,” he said, “I didn’t bring any play-pretties for you to toy with. I don’t have any rubber bands or balls of yarn, but maybe you can sit there quiet and not shoot yourself or me and be all right. You think you can do that?”

Filback let his tongue worm through his cheek. He leaned back in the chair, stowing the shotgun against his thigh. “Hell,” he said. “You asked me to come out here.”

“I sure did,” Elvis answered. “And I’m already feeling guilty about that.”

The deputy twisted on the hams of his thighs, the chair squirming beneath him. “You’re something, know that Elvis?”

“Just remember who signs your paychecks,” Elvis said bruskly.

“Election coming up in the fall,” Filback replied, smiling. “Might be different handwriting on my checks come January.”

Elvis glared at Fillback, then got up from the sofa. He swatted at the pleat in his khakis, stepped carefully around the congealed pools of blood on the floor, and walked to the front door. With one arm braced against the frame, he looked outside on the bright dusty yard and the two dead hounds and the wide fields of billow hay scooting away like whitecaps toward the shade of the treeline.

“I’m going out here to look through the yard, Filback,” he said. “Can you sit in here and not get spooked?”

“Hell, I ain’t afraid. I’ve seen worse than this.”

Elvis shook his head. He stepped out onto the porch and then down the steps, striding through the pale dirt toward the dogs, whose dead bodies had begun to swell. Flies and yellow jackets lit and drooped over the blood spilled thickly on the ground. One dog had been shot through the throat, its neck blown out in a
tear of red meat, while the other had taken it in the chest. Elvis crouched beside their corpses. In the dust, he counted little runs of bird tracks, and a set of boot prints moving off toward the porch. He picked up something that glistened from a clump of cheat grass and held it before his eye, the light prisming down over his hand. It was shard of glass from a headlight. When he checked the headlamps on the LTD and Pete’s truck, he noted that all four were intact. Another puzzle.

Chewing his bottom lip, he moved back toward the dogs. From here, two sets of dog prints seemed to head south toward the pasture. He followed the tracks slowly, through the yard to where the grass began to thicken and then down the lip of the lawn to where the fencing was strung. He put his hands on the top strand of barbs. The wire trembled under his fingers. By the look of the grass something had run through the field.

A bunting bird lit on the wire some yards down, its indigo plumage like a daub dropped by a joy-mad painter. It sang a note and then shot off, falling and then rising on a gust. The wire shook beneath Elvis’s fingers.

He had been reared by his grandmother in a large farmhouse that had sat at the back of a creek bottom hemmed by chestnut oaks. At night, the cool autumn dark settled down brittle and thin like a piece of cold beaten tin, and he would sit with her, she in a rocker, he on the stoop playing with a toy wagon he’d made, rolling its spool wheels over the boards.

“Elvis, your head ain’t right,” she would croak. “They yanked you out with forceps and now you got that crease in your scalp, but it’s nothing to worry with.” The sledrunners of her rocker snicked on the porch. “Though I suspect some will worry anyway.” She leaned and spat a crimson streak of tobacco juice into a Folgers can. “Let them go ahead and worry. Me and you are okay and just fine out here. Know why?”

“No,” said Elvis.

“Because,” she leaned up in her rocker, “we know what birds
mean.” Far off, a screech owl screamed in the oak trees. “Hear that? An owl in this moon means good fortune. Mark it. You can tell a lot of things by birds. Take the coloring of a thrush. He’ll be russet if the winter is going to be mild. A deeper red if it’ll turn heavy snow.” She leaned and spat again. Her phlegm fell into the coffee tin like an offered coin, a thing tithed out, and she wiped her lips with the heel of her palm. “Now, that means we’re all right. So long as we know what birds mean, can’t nothing wrong happen because we can know the wrong that’s coming. Or the good. And it is mostly good, Elvis. Remember that.”

Touching the fence, he thought maybe he’d forgotten how to remember the good. Certainly, he’d forgotten what a bunting meant, if it divined ill or fortune, and he saw no pattern in the parted grasses of the hayfield.

But he did remember his grandmother telling him that his head wasn’t right. Others had said the same thing, and maybe that was so. All the years unmarried, they came back to him as he watched the grass toss and bow. Not just unmarried, but no women to speak of. His house smelled of the rankness of ascetic bachelorhood, of mildew and underwear and shave cream and there were never flowers because he didn’t want a woman, because he didn’t know how to want a woman. The times he attended revivals or church socials, he made a point to stand away from them, bundled like cloth in their dressy bunches, their glossy lips smacking out quick chirpy sounds. Women were things to be ciphered out, figured on. Men were simpler. They did and were done in, whereas women lingered, pummeled into grist by the slow grinding of years until they were like powder cast before the wind.

He thought of Ella Daugherty. Another woman out in the world and left to its mercy.

He turned and walked away from the hayfield, back into the yard where the dogs lay. The wind raised the pawpaw limbs and the shadows drizzled and swam over the house.

“Come out here, Filback,” he called.

A clutzy rattle of beer cans came from inside the house and then the deputy stood in the doorway, the shotgun cradled in his arms.

“I’m going to look for Ella,” Elvis said.

The color washed out of Filback’s cheeks. “You are? What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Stay here and wait for the ambulance,” Elvis said. “You know how to fill out paperwork. And don’t get scared, Filback. There ain’t no such thing as ghosts.” Elvis opened the door to the cruiser and sat down behind the wheel, the car’s shocks rocking under him. He took his hat off and placed it neatly on the passenger seat. Then he cranked the key and the engine groaned over. He turned in the yard and dust rose about him and fled behind as he watched the house and yard disappear in his rearview until he hit the main of the highway and only had to look at what was coming at him instead of worrying about what lay behind.

Ella’s single-wide sat vacant and lone, the driveway empty. The garden pinwheels in the crabby yard spun in the breeze, flashing kaleidoscopic blues and reds and greens brightly in the sunlight. Laundry hanging on the clothesline snapped and rolled.

Elvis knocked heavily on the door, the storm screen creaking at his back, but no one answered. He called her name. Once, twice, three times. Again, nothing.

He left for Daryl’s.

The day flexed hot and ragged as Elvis got out of the cruiser. He remained in the parking lot for a time, studying the collection of junk trucks and failing vehicles, marking the patronage within by the various makes and models squatting in the gravel. At one end of the lot, a rigless trailer stood on its chickenleg mounts, white paint peeling from the aluminum.

When he walked through the doors of the Quonset hut, the
bar talk turned off. Beery eyes reached through the tangled fog to study him. Light spat off the tiered bottles behind the bar and the jukebox played soft and breathy, the squeak of a greasy fiddle sawing out of the speakers. Elvis strode forth through the abruptly broken quiet, his boots loud on the wooden floor, his own form seeming to recede away from himself as he ebbed deeper into this cauldroning dark.

He put his hands on the bar. The wood beneath his fingers felt scored and rough. The tender, a pale and fat scowler, came over to inspect him.

“Where’s Loat?” Elvis asked.

The tender shook his head. “Not here.”

“Let me talk to Daryl then.”

The tender eyed him, his tongue pushed into his cheek. Then he turned and tromped off to the rear of the Quonset.

Elvis waited. He kept his back to the dance floor, studying the drunks in the mirror hanging behind the bar, their bent and stalled bodies wrapped in the cigarette smoke like the web-trapped prey of spiders.

When Daryl emerged from the back, he wore khaki trousers and a camo vest over his hairy belly. He moved like a buoy in the bar’s drafty currents.

“Loat’s not here,” he said, propping the pink stump of an arm on the bar.

“I know,” said Elvis.

“What you want then?”

“You know Beam Sheetmire?”

“Clem’s boy? Yeah, I know who he is.”

Elvis drummed his fingers against the bar. Behind him, the talk and dancing ignited again, the noise firing back to life, though it was now cautious and uneasy.

“What’s he done?” Daryl asked.

Elvis shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “That I know of.”

Daryl wiped his chin against his shoulder, a strange and
birdish motion. “If he ain’t done nothing and you ain’t looking for him, then why are you asking?”

Elvis ignored the question. “Whose trailer is that parked outside?” he asked.

“That’s mine,” Daryl answered. “Got a good deal on it. Plan on using it for storage.”