Читать книгу The Marble Orchard - Alex Taylor - Страница 8

I

TUESDAY

Someone called to Beam from the far bank of the river through the darkness. He heard the man’s voice as it dropped to him dismal and slow.

“I won’t run you for less than five dollars,” Beam yelled in answer.

Spasms of moonlight fell through the rearing trees. The moon itself was mirrored in the river, a doppelganger moon trembling on the black water, and everywhere hung a stillness seemingly permanent, a quiet that gave form to the night’s own immensity.

Beam walked to the bow of the ferry. Moths whirred in the hull lights and he swatted them away. On the landing opposite stood the man who’d called to him, the moon dusting him with a weak and diffuse light.

“You got five dollars?” Beam hollered.

The man picked up a small duffel and hoisted the strap over one shoulder. He turned and began walking away from the river as if in disgust, rising up the landing until his form receded under the locust boughs with their elongate seedpods hung like dead lanterns in those grim and thorny trees. Beam watched him go.

Since sundown, he’d only given passage to a sulking farmer in a rattling tractor, and the want for company had settled on him a lonesomeness that shivered up through his hands as he gripped the flatboat’s railing. He was used to the feeling. It seemed to follow him wherever he went, though he rarely strayed much beyond the ferry and the surrounding bottom country. On nights his daddy let him off duty, Beam might drive Old Dog into the town of Drakesboro to shoot nine ball at The Doe Eyed Lady, a cramped diner that sold fountain drinks and burgers on Wonderbread, the meat so rare and bloody it turned the buns the color of velvet cake. He shot quarter games when money was tight, dollar high when he’d managed to come by extra dough. He had loose friends who joked and ogled the waitresses with him. But even in those times, when the swell of the diner’s clanging noise shrank down and all the billiards slowed and stilled, Beam yet felt a deep loneliness stagger through him, its footsteps heavy and ominous. He felt it again as he watched the man trek up the landing away from the river.

Beam unhitched the keeper chains from the jetty cleats and piled them on the flatboat, then crossed the stern and stepped into the tug. He goosed the throttle and the engine gurgled up and a froth of water boiled from the prop as the ferry crept slowly into the current, and the pulleys screaked along their cables. Driftwood bobbled on the river and the soured reek of mud and locust blossoms rose sharp and hot above the charred stink of diesel. When he was close, Beam cut the engine and let the ferry coast into the landing, the aluminum hull grating on the concrete, and then he fastened the chains to the bollards.

“Five dollars is good money if all you got to do to earn it is run across this river here,” said the man with the duffel. He’d walked back down the landing and now stood just out of the hem of the ferry lights.

“You got a boat to row yourself across with?” Beam asked.

“No,” the man said.

“Then I guess you ain’t got room to complain about the fare.”

The stranger made no reply. He was a broad man and his scalp showed under a thin crew cut. He wore a pale blue collared shirt creased with filth and the corduroy trousers withered against his legs were also dirty and too small for him so that his bare ankles shone white and boney below the cuffs, and when he stepped aboard the ferry Beam saw the broken tennis shoes he wore were caked with cow manure. A red mustache seeped out of his nose and curled around his lips.

Beam looked him over once and then returned to the tug. As he worked the throttle, the man stuck his head into the cabin and said, “I ain’t got five dollars.”

Beam cut the engine. “What’d you say?”

“Said I ain’t got five dollars.” The man’s breath smelled of whisky. “I ain’t got no money at all to give you.”

Beam left the cabin so that he and the stranger stood together on the deck of the ferry. The boat drifted a bit in the current and then steadied as the cables tightened and caught in their iron grommets.

“I ain’t got nothing at all but this here duffel bag.” The man nodded to his luggage slouched in a corner of the deck. “Ain’t nothing in there but extra clothes.”

“You might want to think about changing into them then,” Beam sneered. “Less maybe those in that duffel are worse off than the grimy shit you’re wearing now.”

The man smiled thinly, his eyes cinching into a squint. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Old enough to take this boat back to the side you come from and not give your sorry ass a ride nowhere.”

“I can walk to a bridge.”

Beam threw his hands up and returned to the cabin. He started the engine and began moving back toward the eastern landing. He had no patience for this sort of dawdling. Clem had told him that folks would likely try to bull him over on the ferry on account of his youth and that he couldn’t tolerate such behavior, and so he didn’t, but in truth he hated the gruffness it took to get by in this world, the brute and angry scowling at life that gave a man the upper hand.

The man stuck his head back into the cabin and leaned against the metal door frame. “Hey, man. I was just shitting you. I got five dollars.”

Beam cut the throttle and turned to him. “Let’s see it.”

“Sure, man. Here.” The man dug a wallet of cracked brown leather from his back pocket and produced a wad of singles and handed them to Beam, who counted and then folded them into the plastic Tupperware till sitting on the control panel. Then he ground the starter to life and reversed the prop so the ferry scooted along toward the western landing on the other side of the river.

“I hope that little joke didn’t hurt your feelings none,” the man said. He still hung in the cabin door, his face pale and slick in the feeble light.

Beam steadied the engine and stepped back on deck. The man moved aside to let him pass. For a time, they studied one another in the glum shadows.

“Are you a Sheetmire?” the man asked.

Beam nodded. “Yeah, I am,” he said. The man didn’t look familiar, but plenty knew which family ran the ferry and there rested no surprise in a stranger saying his name.

“I don’t remember you,” the man said. He wiped at his mustache and squinted at Beam, as if trying to fix him in his mind amid a myriad of others. “You don’t look like any Sheetmire.”

A chill rushed in off the river and Beam zipped up the green nylon racing jacket he was wearing. “What do I look like?” he asked.

The man smiled. “Now there’s a dangerous question.” He leaned back against the boat railing and folded his arms across his chest and regarded Beam with a look of snide ridicule. “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t believe Hollywood’s gonna be calling you anytime soon.”

Beam eyed the man curiously. He stood close to the duffel and his entire form seemed to rise from the bag as if he were but some séance trick, a jester’s prank with his shaven head and mustache, the flesh of his face slick and daubed with harlequin light from the cabin and running bulbs of the ferry.

“Who are you?” Beam asked.

The man shook his head once. “You wouldn’t know me,” he said.

Beam spat over the railing into the water. The hull groaned against the current and the river drifted through its own blank darkness, and there came an utterance of depths against the underside of the ferry.

“Where are you going?” Beam asked.

The man looked downstream to where the moonlight rode jagged and broken on the river like mishandled glass.

“Just across,” he said.

“There ain’t much to go to on this side of the river,” said Beam, nodding to the shore as it slowly emerged out the dark. “Just dirt and corn mostly.”

“Way I like it,” said the man. “I like the open air where it ain’t crowded. A man can’t disappear in a city.” He waved a hand at the night and all its distance. “But out here, a fellow can just… be gone.”

The man turned and leaned over the railing like a drunk slouched against a bar. Beam went inside the cabin and cut the throttle back to let the ferry coast. When he reemerged onto the deck, the man was still watching the river tremble along below him.

“Where are you coming from?” Beam asked.

The man looked over his shoulder, his face utterly blank and calm. “Where I come from,” he said, “is a place a boy like you don’t never want to see.”

A fire of anger rushed through Beam and then blew out, a cold crater left in its absence. He didn’t like the way the man had called him a boy, or the way his smile had wormed its way from his face to leave a look empty and unreadable. Beam did not consider himself a boy. He was nineteen, full of bull piss with his own portion of meanness lurking in him, the kind of youth who’d grit teeth at shop windows and bathroom mirrors, at stolen hubcaps and snatched silverware, anything fool enough to throw his own mug back at him. But this stranger had come out of the night teetering with drink to gibe and prod him, and he felt the bite of something old and fierce in his blood. Watching the stranger on the ferry deck, Beam had a sudden vision of throwing the man overboard. The river would take him. There would be a brief plunge, the water broken in a garland of dingy spray before it settled again. It’s what Beam’s father Clem might have done, in his early years. Lurching and cruel in his youth, a frequent thief, Clem had aged into a soft routine of diet soda and bran flakes. But he had been right, in his time. Flash lightning through his veins every Friday night, he slid through those early years on a highway of blood. Beam could barely believe the stories he’d heard, the ones told to him by old loose-mouthed men who rode the ferry, about how a man might wind up broke or broken if he rode the deck after taking too much drink. The years had left a few drift scraps of recollected violence in his memory—waking in the night to the sound of gunfire and then running down to the ferry to find his father bowed over a prone stranger on the deck, looking up at Beam on the landing to say, “No worries. He ain’t dead.” Because Clem had never been a killer. Gruff and lean, he’d been a drinker and a taker of easy money, a schemer at backroom poker games and a parking lot brawler, and the worst crime he’d dipped his hands into was yanking dollars off the drunks who rode the ferry at night. Caution was the word he preached to Beam now, slipping country wisdom into dinnertime conversation. “Don’t get dizzy when the fists go to flying,” he would say. “And don’t throw no punches unless it’s worth a good amount of dough. You don’t want to pull a jail term for short pay.”

“The Gasping is a deep river,” the stranger said, pulling Beam away from his thoughts. The man had turned back to regard the water, his arms folded over the metal railings.

Beam didn’t say anything. He’d stowed an Igloo cooler beside the cabin for his shift and he opened it and took out a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade and drank from it and then put it away again and closed the cooler.

“They say it’s so deep that it just don’t have any bottom in some spots.” The man turned and put his back to the railings so that he stared at Beam. “You believe that?”

Beam shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Somebody told that the Army Corp of Engineers is going to come down here one day with sonar equipment and find the bottom,” he said. “But I don’t think they’ll find it even then because I just don’t think there’s any bottom to find down there. What do you think about that?”

“I think there has to be a bottom,” said Beam. “Somewhere. Things just can’t sink forever.”

“Maybe so.” The man looked out over the water. “They say a man that jumps off the highest mountain has ten minutes to fall before he hits the ground.”

“No.”

“That’s what they say. But what I want to know is who’s the dumb sonuvabitch they got to jump off that mountain?”

“Maybe he didn’t jump. Maybe he was throwed.”

“Could be.” The man shrugged and folded his arms. “Either way, he sure had a spell to think about what it was going to be like once that rocky ground slammed against his head.”

The man suddenly went quiet as if weighing the subject at hand with cautious attention, his eyes squenched into the look of one at grave counsel with himself.

“Believe I’d try and jack off,” he said, finally.

Beam stared at the man. “I don’t think I could do that,” he said.

“Ten minutes not long enough for you, huh? Well, I never had that problem. Every circle jerk I ever was in I finished first and third.”

Beam expected the man to end such a thought with a laugh and when he didn’t, his lips set grimly under the red bristles of his mustache with a look of definite affirmation, Beam shook his head and looked away into the night.

“Oh, well.” The man shrugged. “It’s some folks out there would pay to jump off a mountain. All you’d have to do is tell ‘em there was pussy and birthday cake waiting at the bottom and they’d dole out a hundred dollars and just be tearing to get over the edge.”

The man turned back to the railings. He lifted one shoe to rest it on the bottom rung. Beam saw the outline of the wallet in the back pocket of his jeans and wondered suddenly how much cash a dirty stranger like this might carry and if there was a way to take it from him. And the canvas duffel slouched in a corner of the deck? Who could say what a traveler might be bearing through the foggy dark?

“You smoke?” the man asked over his shoulder. He turned and produced a pack of Kenyon cigarettes from his jeans and took one out and then offered the pack to Beam.

Though he wasn’t a smoker, Beam slid a cigarette out and lit it with the man’s proffered matches. The tobacco crackled as it burned and a thick bower of smoke grew about them, singeing Beam’s lungs until he coughed and spat.

“Smoke,” said the man, grinning. “But not too much, huh?”

Beam threw the cigarette overboard and it hissed in the river.

“Who is your mama and daddy?” the man asked.

“Clem and Derna,” Beam said.

The man repeated the names and then shook his head. “I don’t believe I know them.” He drew on his cigarette. “What’s your mama look like?”

Beam put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He tried to think of his mother. He wondered what she would be doing at this hour and then knew she would be asleep, and then he tried to think what a woman like her, roughed and filed down by years, would dream of, or if she even dreamed at all anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s older.”

The man flicked the ash from his cigarette. “How old?”

“She’s up in her forties.”

“That’s older?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. Her hair is getting gray.”

“I bet she’s a real good woman,” the man said.

Beam’s hands grew cold and numb in his pockets. A breeze swept in off the river and rattled against his jacket and the sweat cooled on his cheeks and then he remembered his mother again, and what he’d heard said about her, even as a boy when what was said was spoken by other boys who didn’t know truly what it meant to say things such as that. And the smell of the locust blooms, ghosting white and flurried over the black wind-folded river, lifted hot and sweet to him again, and he heard the branches shaking, the leaves a-shiver like rain in the dark.

“I bet she’s just about the best woman a man could ever hope to mama him,” said the stranger. “What’d you say her name was before she married?”

“I didn’t say.”

The man drew on his cigarette and then tossed it into the river. “Well, what was it?”

“Kurkendayll.”

“Kurkendayll?”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

The man put his head down, the smoke running out of his nostrils and blowing away in the wind.

“You don’t know her,” Beam said.

The man looked up. His eyes were red with whisky and appeared beleaguered and mournful in the lights of the ferry. “I don’t know her,” he said. “I don’t know anything, bud. You just got to ignore most of what I say.”

Beam felt a sudden weariness descend on him. For a moment, he thought one of his sleeping spells might be about to overtake him and he braced himself against the aluminum wall of the tug cabin and squeezed his eyes shut until the blood boomed in his head. He pressed his cheek to the cold metal and it stung him and roused him further. When he opened his eyes, the stranger was looking at him.

“You sick or something?” he asked.

Beam dragged a hand over his eyes. “Just a little,” he said. He lifted his head and drew a long full breath and then exhaled.

The man had walked just out of the ferry lights now and stood in the dark shadows, his body outlined by the moon.

“You don’t look like any Sheetmire,” he said. His voice sounded thick and slurred, and Beam felt it slide through him. He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the cabin and in a sudden gust all the faces from the Sheetmire homecoming arose from the blank river, but when he opened his eyes only the night was there, black and swirling with cold wind.

“What are you talking about?” Beam asked the stranger.

“I’m saying how you don’t look like any Sheetmire I ever seen.” The man hooked his elbows around the boat railing and licked his teeth. “Wasn’t there a Kurkendayll girl from over around Leachville that married a Sheetmire?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Beam answered.

“Well, is your mama’s family from over around Leachville?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You don’t know if your mama’s folks are from over around Leachville?”

“No.” Beam felt his head begin to ache and pressed his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know any of my mama’s family.”

“You never met your mama’s folks?”

“No.”

“Well, you don’t really know what you are then, do you? You could be an eighth nigger or three quarters sonuvabitch and not have any clue.”

Beam took his hands from his eyes and stared at the man. He looked pale and sickly with the moonlight at his back, his frail arms bowed over the boat railings. Beam wondered suddenly what it would sound like to hear a man drown. To hear it and know you had done it.

“You look like somebody done pissed in your Cheerios, bud,” said the man. He laughed a little and then stopped. “I’m just goofing on you. You ain’t got to act all hard. I never met no Kurkendayll’s or Sheetmire’s in my life.”

The wind cut off the river and Beam shook inside his jacket. What he’d told the man was true. He didn’t know his mother’s family, had never met a single one of them. She claimed they were all long dead, but now Beam wondered why she never traveled to any of the cemeteries to place flowers on their graves or to at least show him where his ancestors were buried. She never spoke of them at all. It were as if they didn’t exist, and Beam knew it was only bad trouble in someone’s past that made them not want to talk about it. Good times and happy days were recounted so often the stories became dried out and useless. But bad times were left untold about, as if to speak of them would call down all the old despairs once more.

“Ain’t you ever had nobody goof with you, bud?” the man asked.

Beam stared at the man a moment, then nodded to the tug.

“I got a bottle in there,” he said.

The man snorted. “That’s the spirit, bud,” he said. “Get us a drink and we’ll swallow down any hard feelings.”

Beam moved into the unlit cabin. He leaned over the throttle lever, looking out the port at the sky spilled with stars. He fumbled in his pocket and found the bottle of caffeine pills his doctor had prescribed and ate three of them hurriedly, washing them down with water from a cup on the control console. His head felt cold and empty.

“Hurry up there, bud,” the man called from outside. “I need to get a drink before I step off this jollyboat.”

Beam leaned down and searched through a hickory wood tool box that held a tire iron, a pipe wrench, an assortment of claw hammers. When he brought his hand back up, it stank of rust, and cobwebs drifted from his fingertips like puppeteer strings. He looked at himself in the port glass. His cheeks narrow and clean and one eye like a burned hole. His hair smoothed and sculpted by the wind. His lips twisty and wormish. He reached into the toolbox again and found the pipe wrench and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Come in here,” he grunted. “I need a light.”

The man shuffled into the small cabin. Beam put his back against a tin wall and pointed below the console. “It’s down there somewhere,” he said. “Light a match and see if you can find it.”

“Ain’t you got a flashlight?”

“Batteries went dead on me.”

“Lord help,” the man said, striking a match. “I just don’t see how somebody like you ever gets by without somebody else. You’re just about like an old goat, ain’t you? Don’t care if your ass is in the sun so long as your head’s in the shade. That right?”

The man was stooping now, guiding the match under the console, throwing light into the webby shadows. His neck was bare above the collar of his shirt. The hairless knuckles of his spine showed a peeling sunburn.

“You don’t know me,” Beam said. “You don’t know who I am.”

The man went on rummaging through the boxes, the match lighting a small corona in the dark.

“Forget it, okay bud?” he said. “I told you I was only goofing.”

“No. You act like you know me, but you don’t.”

The man turned on his haunches and looked up at Beam. The match flame halved his face, the fire splitting the cheeks into red and black, and his eyes were two glass bells to hold the flame.

“You’re right,” he said, finally. “I don’t know you.”

The match went out. “There ain’t no bottle down here,” the man said.

Beam backed toward the cabin door. He put his hand behind him and felt the wrench in his back pocket, then took his hand away and leaned against the cabin wall.

“My old man must’ve finished it off,” he said.

The man stood up slowly, his form silhouetted by the moonlit window at his back. In the dark, he seemed much larger than he had in the lights of the ferry, and his breath rustled loud and grating in his chest.

“I see you got a till here,” he said. He gestured toward the Tupperware bowl that sat on the control panel, then turned back to Beam. His lips cut into a dim smile. “How much it got in there?”

Beam put his hand into his back pocket and gripped the handle of the wrench again. “I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” he said.

For a moment, the man didn’t move. Then he took the till from the console and held it under his arm.

“How’d it be if I just took this?”

“You’re not going to take it,” Beam said.

“You talk like you got some say in it.”

“I do got a say in it.”

The man shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”

He made to move toward the door and when he did Beam pulled the wrench from his pocket and hit the man across the top of the head, opening a gash from the top of his brow to the bridge of his nose. The blood spilled down his face like a veil and the man stared at Beam a moment as if in shocked recognition before he fell forward onto the deck, the aluminum bonging hollowly beneath him.

All of time seemed to have fixed itself on this point so that Beam felt he could not move from where he stood on the deck. Before him lay the body of the stranger, a damp black pool spreading from his head. Somewhere, the chug of the diesel could be heard but dimly so it might have been only imagined. His hand throbbed from the blow he’d dealt the stranger.

So frozen was Beam he didn’t notice the ferry had reached the shore until it was too late and the prow crumpled against the concrete landing and sparks shot off the torn metal until the boat finally came to rest with half its hull beached on the muddy ramp. The impact knocked Beam to his knees. When he recovered, he quickly turned the engine off and leaned against the control console, sweat dribbling off his scalp into his eyes. He wiped them, then turned and saw the man had rolled onto his back on the ferry deck. Blood spilled out of his ear and covered his face. His eyes were drowsy and half closed. As the breath ran in and out of him it made small brushy sounds like a creature building a nest, readying itself to lie down and be still forever.

Beam found the pipe wrench again and picked it up and then squatted beside the man.

“What you got to say now, you sonuvabitch?” said Beam.

The man coughed and then managed to whisper the name “Loat” and then the breath left him.

Beam stood up. He dropped the wrench onto the deck, the metal droning out long and shivery. For a time he felt he would pass out. Then a breeze swam out of the locust trees and his breathing evened and he knew that he would not. Somewhere off in the night, a catfish rolled on the surface of the river and then the chiseling talk of crickets sounded in the dark.

Beam staggered from the ferry and then up the landing toward the house that soon rose before him dim and quiet beneath the smeary vexed moonlight.

He came and stood on the porch. Through the window, the vampish light of the television jerked eely blue and he knocked steadily on the blank unpainted door. As if this were not his home, as though he were but some traveler adrift in a country he did not know.

“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.”