Читать книгу The Marble Orchard - Alex Taylor - Страница 11

IV

WEDNESDAY

They woke late to the baying of hounds in the nighttime. The howls of the dogs rolled against the windows, then fled down the chimney, ceaseless and somehow resolute against the darkness through which they came until the sound seemed to have neither source nor limit but grew to be the very rage and roar of the night itself.

When Clem looked out the bedroom window, one finger pulling at a gauzy curtain, he saw the pale blue Cadillac parked in the yard and his chest tightened.

“What is it?” Derna asked.

He turned to her. In the blank moonlight filtering through the curtains her hair sprawled scalloped and silver on the pillow beneath her head. He knew she hadn’t slept. Since bedding down, he’d been awake himself, listening as she wept quietly beside him. The sheriff had been by that afternoon to deliver the news of Paul’s body being found in the river and she’d waited until sundown to begin mourning. Her people were ruddy Irish and Dutch stock and they retained customs such as that, believing it improper to shed tears for the dead in daylight.

“It’s where I figured him to wind up,” she’d said when Elvis brought her the news, her eyes stern and dry. Now she sniffled and wiped her face with the backs of her hands, and Clem reckoned all women strange and beyond his understanding. She had not seen Paul since he was a toddler and but for a slight written correspondence they’d exchanged in the past few years, had had no dealings with him at all. Yet here she was crying over him.

“What is it out there?” she asked again.

“It’s Loat,” Clem said. “We knew he’d come.” He bent down and picked his jeans up off the floor and pulled them on, then took the .32 snubnose from the bedside drawer. He left the room shirtless, and kept the lights off as he went through the house. When he reached the front door, he placed his forehead against it. The hounds had bounded onto the porch, their claws scraping at the wooden boards.

“Loat,” Clem called, and the dogs went quiet. “Loat, I’m here. What do you want?”

A dizzying silence. Behind him, Derna crept to the edge of the hallway, the dry cracked heels of her bare feet scuffling through the dirt on the hardwood floor.

Clem heard a click and when he turned, he saw she cradled his twelve gauge pump-action Mossberg.

“He won’t talk unless you open that door,” she said.

Clem nodded at the gun in her hands. “What you aim to do with that bear killer?”

She shook her head and the gray sleep-kinked curls of her hair swung around her face, casting erratic shadows over her cheeks. “When something like Loat comes in my yard, I want to be ready,” she said.

Clem was accustomed to this from his wife. A vein of stone filled the cleft in her soul and through that rough obdurate part of her there was no path that led to softer footing.

He turned back to the door and placed his hand on the cold brass knob. “I’m going to open this door Loat,” he said loudly. “I don’t want nothing to happen unless it has to.” Clem opened the door a crack. “Loat,” he said.

Someone whistled and the dogs bounded from the porch into the yard. Clem watched them scuttle to the Cadillac and then settle in the grass beside it, a half-dozen Dobermans, their sleek coats glinting in the moonlight.

“I’m right here,” said Loat.

Clem made him out. He was leaned against the grille of the Cadillac, the dogs seated before him. He wore his straw hat and the moonlight spilled from the brim and onto his chest before dripping into the flecked tweedy lawn. He was bare-armed in a sleeveless shirt, tall and splay-legged and thin, all of him as skeletal and illusory as a scarecrow.

“Come on out here on your porch, Clem,” he said.

Clem opened the door and stepped onto the boards, keeping the pistol hidden behind his thigh. Squinting from beneath the eaves, he saw another man stood beside Loat. That would be Presto Geary, Loat’s driver. He was a large man, his head naked and bald as polished marble, and in his belt rode a pair of .44 hog leg pistols.

“Wake you up?” Loat asked.

“I’d say so.” Clem stretched and feigned a yawn.

“Well, it’s not many folks left that keep the hours I do.” Loat jerked his chin and Presto passed him a cigarette. The flame of a match scurried out of the dark, briefly lighting Loat’s cheeks and nose until he waved it out. “And besides,” he said, “you know me. I like to get out and ride around after a rain when the sky’s cleared off.” He raised a hand and pointed toward the moon where it hung in the sky like a white ring of bone. “Let’s me breathe better,” he said.

Clem laid his pistol on the porch railing. “What do you want?” he asked.

Loat drew on his cigarette. “Heard tell my boy’s gone.”

“Which boy would that be?”

“Don’t act ignorant.”

Clem spat into the grass growing beside the porch steps. “Paul never was your boy,” he said. “All you ever done was run him off when he got to working on your nerves. He got more raising from the drunks and whores out at Daryl’s than he ever did from you.”

Loat thumped his cigarette into the yard, the orange tip tracing through the dark before it shattered in the grass. “I didn’t come out here to get a lesson on daddying from you,” he said. “Paul was mine by blood and I did a damn sight more for him than Derna ever did.”

“Well, it don’t matter one way or the other now,” said Clem. “He’s gone and that’s all there is to it.”

Loat propped a boot on the Cadillac’s front fender and folded his arms over his chest. “Who did it?” he asked.

Clem shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you.”

“He was bringing me something.”

Clem picked a few splinters from the porch railing and flung them into the yard. He stared at Loat where he stood in the full moonlight. He’d make an easy target, and doubtless knew this, but Clem could tell the man was unafraid and that whatever fear there was in the night stood with him underneath the porch eaves. “Derna ain’t heard nothing out of him going on three years,” he said. “Elvis and those state boys been coming by this week, ever since Paul walked off the yard down there at Eddyville, but we hadn’t heard a peep out of him. That suited me just fine. I never did want to know nothing about Paul. Whatever kind of souvenir or good luck charm he was bringing you, I don’t want to know nothing about that neither.”

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.

“Dollbaby,” he said. “Is the heat in here getting to you?”

Derna raised her head. Her eyes had a drowsy cast to them and her open mouth burned a bright ring of color in the center of her powdered face.

“Yes,” she said, almost gasping. “I think maybe I’d better go lay down.” She stumbled out of the room and clomped down the hall to the room where Loat kept her bedded. For a time, the men stared after her, a bit dazed by what they’d seen. But whatever it had been, true bliss or performed rapture, it had diffused the simmering violence in the room so that Boyce Hazelip raked his chips from the table into his black-banded hat.

“I’ll cash these leavings with you at a later date, Loat,” he said.

Loat gave no reply as Hazelip exited the house. The other men around the table listened to the cough and grind of his ancient Ford pickup, the engine giving grate and snarl as it descended the grade from Loat’s house to the main trace that led back to town. When the noise had diminished, Loat ordered that the game be finished. His gaze was calm and serene as he dealt the final hand.

A week later, Boyce Hazelip’s wife found him in his burley patch with his throat slit. Loat was brought in for questioning, but the sway of his influence extended into lofty pockets, and the police soon turned their inquiries elsewhere, and when the trail went cold, the matter was mostly forgotten.

For Clem, this seemed but a footnote to the larger story. What he’d seen that night was a woman throttled by the scene of two men paired against each other, the smell of their building blood hot in the close dingy room. It was the first time he looked upon Derna as something more than just another woman. Her back arced against the iron stove, the sweat dribbling from the crease of her hairline—it all gave her the appearance of a woman being inhabited by forces larger than herself, and the gruff moan as it slid from her throat made it clear the forces were welcome, that her body longed to house them.

“Go on, Clem,” she said, bringing him back from memory. “Fetch the Hoover so I can run it over the carpet here. You’ve dropped cornbread or something all through the house.” Her hand darted at invisible crumbs.

Clem retrieved the vacuum, plugged it into an outlet, then sat it before her. She laid the shotgun beside her on the couch and turned on the machine, its brash roar rattling the windows as she wheeled it over the carpet, soft plumes of dust rising about her. Her look was empty and calm, as if this were an action as somber and driven of anger as church.

Clem watched her for a spell, then went to fetch his baking soda.