The Marble Orchard. Alex Taylor
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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