Читать книгу The Marble Orchard - Alex Taylor - Страница 12

V

In the morning sometimes, a white vintage Cadillac would coast into town and lurch to a stop in the gravel parking lot of Steff General Merchandise, the car rocking on its chassis as the motor sputtered and died. In the backseat rode a band of six Doberman hounds posed in various attitudes. At the wheel was Presto Geary and beside him sat Loat Duncan, his face shaded under the straw hat that marked him to folks from a distance. The men on the porch of the store would nod or hello him, but Loat rarely spoke, passing on into the cool dark of the mercantile, bent upon his own mysterious business.

The dogs waited in the car. These were not jolly hounds, but had the look of beasts borne up from some uncharted desert, their lean tapered forms resembling those of jackals, though they were much larger and coated in the black and tan pattern of their breed. When Loat and Presto emerged from the store bearing their brown-bagged groceries, the men on the porch were glad to see them go as the dogs made them nervous because they were clearly bred for hunting and the hunting they were bred for was the hunting of men.

Once the Cadillac drove away in a fog of bone-colored dust, the men on the porch would resume their talk, the appearance of Loat directing the conversation toward grim memory.

“He was around twenty or so I guess when it happened with him and Daryl.”

“He was young I remember.”

“Young, but mean already.”

“Who else was with them the night it happened?”

“Clem Sheetmire. You know that.”

“Oh. I recollect now.”

“The three of them run out to the Peabody mines. Course the mines had been shut down for a year at that time and that was the summer when if a man had any copper laying around he better sit on it if he didn’t want it stole. Folks would leave for church and come home to find the wiring tore right out the walls of their house that copper was going at such a price.”

The sun had shifted to fall slantwise beneath the porch eaves, and the men moved in tandem to the cooler shade of the concrete steps.

“It was Daryl climbed that transformer pole out at the mines. All three of them thought the power had been shut off and I guess anybody would have thought the same, seeing as the mines had pulled out a year before.”

“The power hadn’t been shut off though, had it?”

“No sir. Daryl climbed that pole with a set of bolt cutters and when he laid into the line it exploded. Blew his arms clean off at the elbow.”

A collective nodding of heads.

“Electricity cauterized him, didn’t it? That’s why he didn’t bleed to death?”

“That’s right. Only, I bet there’s been times he wished to hell he had of bled to death. It can’t be no easy life without your arms.”

“No, I suppose not. But he up and sued Peabody and raked in a hell of a settlement, didn’t he? And he was the one stealing from them.”

Heads shaking in mute disbelief.

“Another thing I heard told, and it may not be right, but that it was Loat made Clem and Daryl throw dice to see who’d climb that pole. Daryl threw low was how come it was him to climb up there instead of Clem.”

“Is that what happened?”

“What I heard. Heard Clem always carried a set of dice in his pocket he loved to gamble so much and that he rolled them with Daryl that night to see who’d go up. I also heard those dice were loaded.”

“Well, I guess that explains why Daryl never had much use for Clem after that, don’t it?”

One of the men took a thin carpenter nail from his shirt pocket and began to pick his teeth with it. When he was done, he leaned over and spat off the porch into the dust.

“Ask me, Daryl’s been laying for Clem ever since.”

“Well, he’s taking his time, ain’t he? That all happened twenty years ago or better.”

“Don’t matter. He’ll take care of Clem when the time comes. You wait and see.”

The men mumbled begrudged dismay at this, the breath swarming out of them in long gusts as they palmed the sweat from their faces. They spoke of other things for a little while, and then, after a time, became very quiet.