The Marble Orchard (5 page)

“Wrecked her pretty good, didn’t you?” Clem said. He kicked the torn prow of the ferry and the metal boomed hollow and empty. “Where’s the fella you hit?”

Beam nodded toward the body of the stranger. Clem hoisted himself aboard and then Beam followed, their boots clomping on the hull as it listed and swayed.

Clem turned on the wheat light he carried. The beam lit a pair of ragged tennis shoes and two pale calves going up into mired corduroy slacks. The light went higher. Up to the pink nostrils. The stubble on the man’s neck aglint like filings of metal. The blood drying on his face.

“Say he’s dead?” Clem asked.

“Yes,” said Beam. “I believe so.”

Clem went forward a step, then stopped. He turned back and walked to the duffel lying on the deck. Squatting, he tucked the light under his arm and moved the zipper down, his hands riffling through a bundle of clothes, old shirts and jeans. A tube of Crest toothpaste. A disposable razor. One canister of Barbasol shave foam. The remains of a tuna sandwich. Implements of hurried travel.

“Say he tried to steal the till?” Clem asked.

“He did,” said Beam. “He picked it up off the console and said he was taking it.”

“What the hell was he doing in the cabin?”

Beam stammered and then wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “He just come in,” he said, finally.

“That so?”

“Yeah,” Beam nodded. “That’s what happened.”

Clem zipped the duffel closed and then stood and entered the cabin. His light washed up the interior wall. The he came back on deck and stooped over the man’s body, cupping a hand under his nose. Then he took his hand away and brushed it clean against his thigh. Then the light went out.

“He said a name,” Beam said. “He said the name Loat.”

“Did he?”

Beam nodded. “You think he meant Loat Duncan?”

Clem paced to the other end of the ferry where the man’s
duffel sat and he looked down at it for a time, his huge chin resting on his chest. A slight rain had begun falling and thunder kettled in the west.

“That’s the only Loat I know,” he finally said.

Beam dragged his hands through his hair. “What are we going to do?” he asked. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

Clem turned and looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “He’s dead.”

“What do we do?”

“Not exactly certain.” Clem cracked his knuckles. “Was there no other way to have done it?”

Beam moved closer to his father. In the darkness, he smelled the soured reek of the shirt Clem hadn’t changed since yesterday, and he heard Clem’s aged bent hands twisting together in the night.

“He just come at me,” Beam said. “He said he was taking the money and there was nothing I could do about it. I never meant to do him as bad as I done.”

Clem looked at the river. In the cast of the hull lights, tiny motes of dust blew around his face and turned in the glare. As if he were exhaling ash, as if some yet inextinguishable fire quarreled with his guts.

“Well, maybe he’s carrying a few dollars,” Clem said.

“Maybe.”

“Did you look?”

Beam shook his head.

“Well, why don’t you look and see. He paid his fare didn’t he?”

“You want me to get his wallet out?”

“That’s most likely where he’s keeping his money.”

“I don’t want to.”

Clem put his hands on the boat railings. “You already killed him, Beam. Get that straight. You already killed him so stealing ain’t near the worst thing you’ve done.”

Beam curled his fists up. His stomach tossed around. He felt a bruised sleep coming on, and he knew he’d have to move to stay
awake, and so he went and squatted beside the dead man. This close, he smelled the whisky again, and the manure and mud, and something older and stronger, and then he knew what he smelled was blood.

He slid the man’s wallet free from his jeans. He wiped his hands clean against the man’s chest, his fingers leaving a black trident of bloodstain on the man’s shirt. The wallet smelled rough and dusty like the inside of a barn.

“Twenty dollars,” Beam said, plucking a bill out. He turned and showed Clem the money.

“Keep it,” he said, jerking his chin. “He got a license in there?”

Beam paused. “Why are we taking his money? Won’t that look strange to the cops?”

“We’re not calling the cops.”

“But it’s self-defense. They can’t fault me none for that. He was trying to rob me.” Beam’s voice pitched high and windy and he was about to speak again when Clem gave him a look so hot and wild it silenced him.

“You do like I say,” he said. “Now put that money in your pocket and see if there’s anything else in his wallet.”

Beam stuffed the money into his jeans and searched the wallet. A rubber, some coins, an address in St. Louis scrawled on a piece of hotel stationery. This was all.

“Nothing?” asked Clem.

Beam shook his head.

He coughed and stood and moved back onto the deck beside his father. Both of them looked at the body lying there, each wordless and stalled, hearing the river and the night buzz around them, the small shaft of light from Clem’s lantern falling sheer and clean against the dead man’s limp cheeks.

“What are we going to do?” Beam asked. He raked the hair back over his head and swallowed.

“I’m still thinking,” said Clem.

Beam felt his stomach go sour. “You say you don’t know him?”

“I don’t believe so.” Clem went to the body again, dropping the light flush into the man’s face.

“I don’t know what to do,” Beam muttered. “I don’t know what to do.”

Clem stood up calmly and it seemed he hadn’t heard his son. He kept his head bowed, staring at the body before him, as if a man attending services grave and doom-kindled, and his own shadow leapt out into the light like some crepuscular rake jarred up with nethering prayers.

Slowly, he said, “You got to leave this place and you got to go tonight.”

II

WEDNESDAY

A damp morning. Rain had begun in the deep of the night and fallen steadily until dawn and at sunrise scraps of mist lay in the bottom country like shorn husks. The Gasping flowed quick and sudsy, its brown churned waters carrying driftwood and other debris downstream, crossties and bridge timbers, stray john boats and car doors, milk jugs and paint cans. There were strange catches in the locust trees, tires and saddle blankets and other such garbage, and a lacy negligee like a bawdy ghost dripped from a thorn bough and from some lowland grave a rosewood casket unearthed by the deluge floated downstream and spun in an eddy before the current took it on, and in the darker woods beyond the roar of the river was the slow ping and drip of water so that this world seemed cold and cavernous and in unceasing plummet.

Sheriff Elvis Dunne drove the cruiser slowly along the river road, the brake discs steaming as the tires pushed through the ponded rainwater. He was a small man with clean hands. In middle age, his face had acquired the grooved, vaguely scuffed look of old furniture, though his hair had grown to a dark chestnut brown that gave credence to the rumor that he had it dyed. However, he was otherwise known as a man without vanity.

He was fond of antiques, a collector. Those who called on him at home usually found him stowed in a room of urns and carafes, tapestries and gilt mirrors, his hands working linseed oil into the stained wood of a footstool, and though he had a fondness for the aged and dusty, he wasn’t a man opposed to progress.

“In ten years,” he said to his passengers, “I’d like to see all the county paved.”

The two riding beside him were state troopers by the names of Donaldson and Pretshue. Water dripped from the clear plastic rain ponchos they wore. Both men kept still and quiet, giving each other brief sideways glances at the lilting rasp of the sheriff’s voice.

“Ten years,” Elvis said. “There won’t be any gravel roads left around here by then. No more washouts and hang-ups. People will have a lot easier time of it then.”

Donaldson pushed a cigarette between his lips and lit it with the cruiser’s lighter. Beyond the windshield, the world was a dim smear. On the north side of the road were bottoms filled with white cattle, some standing belly-deep in sedge grass. On the south side was the Gasping River.

“That’s all fine and good, Elvis,” Donaldson said. “But what I want to know is when you plan to fix people from winding up drowned in your rivers. Believe this is the third one this year.”

Elvis kept his eyes on the road. The wipers squelched over the dirty windshield. “I’ll guess we’ll fix that long about the time the boys down at Eddyville figure out how to keep their cons from going AWOL,” he said.

Donaldson gnawed the butt of his Winston and chuckled, but Pretshue said nothing.

“There’s not much way to fix folks doing each other in,” said Elvis. “What I’ve found anyway. I talk to a lot of these old timers around here and they say it’s worse now than before, but I don’t believe it. Ask me, they’re all just sorry they can’t get out and do awful like they used to.” He wiped a finger over his teeth, scratched the plaque away with his thumbnail, then wiped his finger against his trouser leg. “They just don’t like being benchwarmers,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

“Old timers,” Donaldson said, slinging water from the brim of his hat. “You’re about to be one yourself aren’t you, Elvis?”

“If I live long enough.”

“Old timers,” repeated Pretshue. “What the fuck do they know?”

Elvis cracked his window and the rain flitted in. “One thing I do know is how much I hate this weather,” he said.

The cruiser topped a rise and Elvis let it coast to the bottom before pulling under a stand of cottonwoods where several other cruisers were parked already. An ambulance idled there also, as well as the county coroner’s burgundy Buick. Beyond the trees, the Gasping rolled by, its waters swollen from the recent rain. Men stood on the shore. Elvis’ deputies, shrinkwrapped in raincoats. At their feet, a body bound with logging chain.

“Reckon that’s our boy wrapped up in those?” Donaldson asked.

“I hope to hell it is,” said Pretshue. “That fucker has been trouble and I hope he’s drowned. That’d solve my headaches.”

All three men exited the cruiser. Elvis went first down the steep bank, followed closely by the two troopers. The deputies nodded to him as he approached, but only gave cold glares to Donaldson and Pretshue.

When Elvis reached the river bank, he squatted beside the body. The fishes and turtles had been at it and some of its fingers were missing and a wet reek like carpet left too long in a cellar hung in the air.

“Whoever did it, Elvis, they weighed him down with this.” The coroner toed a three foot section of railroad track lying in the mud. He was a tall thin man with a dark complexion and under the blank sky he seemed like a streak of ink running out of the clouds. He spoke with a deep wet croak. “It wasn’t enough,” he said. “Two old boys out running trot lines come on him this morning. Just floating. I’d say he’s been under for a day at the most and probably not even that long.” The coroner propped his boot on the section of track and wiped both hands against his trousers and then through his hair. He wore no raincoat. “What I mean is, I’d wager he was put in there last night.”

Elvis nodded and scraped at his chin. “Looks like somebody gave him a swat to the head there,” he said, pointing to the puckered wound on the dead man’s brow. “This your boy, Donaldson?”

The trooper stepped closer and leaned in, stowing his hands on his knees.

“I don’t know. Hard to tell from what the river’s done to him.” Donaldson stood up, running a thumbnail over his belt. “I thought you would know him, Elvis.”

“Me? Why would I know him?”

“Well, this is your county. You run him in when he had the wreck and killed that woman. I thought you’d know him.”

Elvis sighed. He dragged his hat lower on his brow. “That,” he said, “was nine years ago.”

Pretshue pushed his hands into his pockets. The plastic poncho rattled around him, and his nostrils flared as a green tint rose under his cheekbones. “Hell,” he said. “If you don’t know him, then who does?”

Elvis stood up and looked at the covey of deputies. “Where are those old boys at that found him?”

Someone pointed downstream.

Under a red gum stood two men, each dressed in ball caps and shiny rubber hip-waders. They drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. Their johnboat was hitched to a sycamore root jutting from the bank, and they watched it closely as if it were a nervous horse they expected to bolt at any moment.

“He was out there,” one of them said when Elvis and the troopers approached. The man raised his coffee cup and pointed to the river with his pinky, but the world before his finger was unmarkable and without definite origin, an empty spill before windbraided trees, and he might have meant any place in all that wide coursing surge. “We brung him to shore then called you boys down.” He looked past Elvis at the body lying in the sandy mud. “Dead as a drownt cow.”

“Yes.” Elvis nodded. He took a small steno pad and pen from
his shirt pocket and began running the pen nervously over the notebook wires. “He is.”